•The Creed of the Old South 



1865-1915 





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THE CREED OF THE 
OLD SOUTH 



C6c Bori aJS^aitimott (Jlreeer 

BALTIMOUE, MD., U. S. A. 



THE CREED OF 
THE OLD SOUTH 

1865-1915 

BY 

BASIL L. GILDERSLEEVE 



BALTIMORE 

THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS 
1915 






Copyright, 1915, 

BY 

THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS 



i/ 



JUL 28 1915 
©CI.A406913 



PREFACE 

In the last score of years I have often been 
urged by friends and sympathizers to bring 
out as a separate issue my article, The Creed 
of the Old South, which appeared in the 
Atlantic Monthly of January, 1892, and 
which attracted wider attention than anything 
I have ever written. As this is the jubilee of 
the great year 1865, the memories of that dis- 
tant time come thronging back to the actors in 
the momentous struggle, and I am prompted 
to publish in more accessible form my record 
of views and impressions that may seem 
strange even to the survivors of the conflict, 
now rapidly passing away. To this paper I 
have added an essay on a cognate theme — 
A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War — 
which was published in the Atlantic Monthly 
of September, 1897, and which has been 
accepted by the eminent historian, Mr. 
Rhodes, as an historical document. These 



PREFACE 



specimens of what I call my Sargasso work 
("Weeds from the Atlantic") are repro- 
duced by the kind permission of the Houghton 
Mifflin Company. A few slips of pen and 
type have been corrected, and a few notes out 
of the mass of literature evoked by the first 
essay, or akin to it, have been added for the 
benefit of the third generation. 

The Johns Hopkins University, 
June, 1915. 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

A few months ago, as I was leaving Balti- 
more for a summer sojourn on the coast of 
Maine, two old soldiers of the war between 
the States took their seats immediately behind 
me in the car, and began a lively conversation 
about the various battles in which they had 
faced each other more than a quarter of a cen- 
tury ago, when a trip to New England would 
have been no holiday jaunt for one of their 
fellow-travellers. The veterans went into the 
minute detail that always puts me to shame, 
when I think how poor an account I should 
give, if pressed to describe the military move- 
ments that I have happened to witness; and I 
may as well acknowledge at the outset that I 
have as little aptitude for the soldier's trade 
as I have for the romancer's. Single incidents 
I remember as if they were of yesterday. 
Single pictures have burned themselves Into 



8 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

my brain. But I have no vocation to tell how 
fields were lost and won; and my experience 
of military life was too brief and desultory to 
be of any value to the historian of the war. 
For my own life that experience has been of 
the utmost significance, and despite the heavy 
price I have had to pay for my outings, 
despite the daily reminder of five long months 
of intense suffering, I have no regrets. An 
able-bodied young man, with a long vacation 
at his disposal, could not have done otherwise, 
and the right to teach Southern youth for nine 
months was earned by sharing the fortunes of 
their fathers and brothers at the front for 
three. Self-respect is everything; and it is 
something to have belonged in deed and in 
truth to an heroic generation, to have shared 
in a measure Its perils and privations. But that 
heroic generation is apt to be a bore to a gener- 
ation whose heroism Is of a different type, and 
I doubt whether the young people in our car 
took much interest in the very audible con- 
versation of the two veterans. Twenty-five 
years hence, when the survivors will be curiosi- 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 9 

ties, as were Revolutionary pensioners in my 
childhood, there may be a renewal of interest. 
As it is, few of the present generation pore 
over The Battles and Leaders of the Civil 
War, and a grizzled old Confederate has 
been heard to declare that he intended to be- 
queath his copy of that valuable work to some 
one outside of the family, so provoked was he 
at the supineness of his children. And yet, for 
the truth's sake, all these battles must be 
fought over and over again, until the account 
is cleared, and until justice is done to the valor 
and skill of both sides. 

The two old soldiers were talking ami- 
cably enough, as all old soldiers do, but they 
" yarned," as all old soldiers do, and though 
they talked from Baltimore to Philadelphia, 
and from Philadelphia to New York, their 
conversation was lost on me, for my thoughts 
went back into my own past, and two pictures 
came up to me from the time of the war. 

In the midsummer of 1863 I was serving 
as a private in the First Virginia Cavalry, 
Gettysburg was in the past, and there was not 



lo THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

much fighting to be done, but the cavalry was 
not wholly idle. Raids had to be intercepted, 
and the enemy was not to be allowed to vaunt 
himself too much ; so that I gained some expe- 
rience of the hardships of that arm of the serv- 
ice, and found out by practical participation 
what is meant by a cavalry charge. To a 
looker-on nothing can be finer. To the one who 
charges, or is supposed to charge, — for the 
horse seemed to me mainly responsible, — the 
details are somewhat cumbrous. Now in one 
of these charges some of us captured a number 
of the opposing force, among them a young 
lieutenant. Why this particular capture should 
have impressed me so I cannot tell, but mem- 
ory is a tricky thing. A large red fox scared 
up from his lair by the fight at Castleman's 
Ferry stood for a moment looking at me ; and 
I shall never forget the stare of that red fox. 
At one of our fights near Kernstown a spent 
bullet struck a horse on the side of his nose, 
which happened to be white, and left a perfect 
imprint of itself; and the jerk of the horse's 
head and the outline of the bullet are present 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH ii 

to me still. The explosion of a particular 
caisson, the shriek of a special shell, will ring 
in one's ears for life. A captured lieutenant 
was no novelty, and yet this captured lieuten- 
ant caught my eye and held it. A handsomer 
young fellow, a more noble-looking, I never 
beheld among Federals or Confederates, as 
he stood there, bare-headed, among his cap- 
tors, erect and silent. His eyes were full of 
fire, his lips showed a slight quiver of scorn, 
and his hair seemed to tighten its curls in de- 
fiance. Doubtless I had seen as fine specimens 
of young manhood before, but if so, I had seen 
without looking, and this man was evidently 
what we called a gentleman. 

Southern men were proud of being gentle- 
men, although they have been told in every 
conceivable tone that it was a foolish pride, — 
foolish in Itself, foolish in that it did not have 
the heraldic backing that was claimed for it; 
the utmost concession being that a number of 
" deboshed " younger sons of decayed gentry 
had been shipped to Virginia in the early set- 
tlement of that colony. But the very pride 



12 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

played Its part in making us what we were 
proud of being, and whether descendants of 
the aforesaid " deboshed," of simple English 
yeomen, of plain Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, 
a sturdy stock, of Huguenots of various ranks 
of life, we all held to the same standard, and 
showed, as was thought, undue exclusiveness 
on this subject. But this prisoner was the em- 
bodiment of the best type of Northern youth, 
with a spirit as high, as resolute, as could be 
found in the ranks of Southern gentlemen ; and 
though in theory all enlightened Southerners 
recognized the high qualities of some of our 
opponents, this one noble figure in " flesh and 
blood " was better calculated to inspire respect 
for " those people," as we had learned to call 
our adversaries, than many pages of " gray 
theory." 

A little more than a year afterwards. In 
Early's Valley campaign, — a rude school of 
warfare, — I was serving as a volunteer aide 
on General Gordon's staff. The day before 
the disaster of Fisher's Hill I was ordered, 
together with another staff officer, to accom- 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 13 

, > 

pany the general on a ride to the front. The 
general had a well-known weakness for in- 
specting the outposts, — a weakness that made 
a position in his suite somewhat precarious. 
The officer with whom I was riding had not 
been with us long, and when he joined the staff 
had just recovered from wounds and imprison- 
ment. A man of winning appearance, sweet 
temper, and attractive manners, he soon made 
friends of the military family, and I never 
learned to love a man so much in so brief an 
acquaintance, though hearts knit quickly in 
the stress of war. He was highly educated, 
and foreign residence and travel had widened 
his vision without affecting the simple faith 
and thorough consecration of the Christian. 
Here let me say that the bearing of the Con- 
federates is not to be understood without tak- 
ing into account the deep religious feeling of 
the army and its great leaders. It is an his- 
torical element, like any other, and is not to be 
passed over in summing up the forces of the 
conflict. " h soldier without religion," says 
a Prussian officer, who knew our army as well 



14 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

as the German, " is an instrument without 
value " ; and it is not unlikely that the knowl- 
edge of the part that faith played in sustain- 
ing the Southern people may have lent empha- 
sis to the expression of his conviction. 

We rode together towards the front, and as 
we rode our talk fell on Goethe and on Faust, 
and of all passages the soldiers' song came up 
to my lips, — the song of soldiers of fortune, 
not the chant of men whose business it was to 
defend their country. Two lines, however, 
were significant: — 

Kiihn ist das Muhen, 
Herrlich der Lohn. 

We reached the front. An occasional " zip " 
gave warning that the sharpshooters were not 
asleep, and the quick eye of the general saw 
that our line needed rectification and how. 
Brief orders were given to the officer in com- 
mand. My comrade was left to aid in carry- 
ing them out. The rest of us withdrew. 
Scarcely had we ridden a hundred yards 
towards camp when a shout was heard, and, 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 15 

turning round, we saw one of the men running 
after us. " The captain had been killed." 
The peace of heaven was on his face, as I 
gazed on the noble features that afternoon. 
The bullet had passed through his official 
papers and found his heart. He had received 
his discharge, and the glorious reward had 
been won. 

This is the other picture that the talk of the 
two old soldiers called up, — dead Confederate 
against living Federal; and these two pictures 
stand out before me again, as I am trying to 
make others understand and to understand 
myself what it was to be a Southern man 
twenty-five years ago; what it was to accept 
with the whole heart the creed of the Old 
South. The image of the living Federal bids 
me refrain from harsh words in the presence 
of those who were my captors. The dead 
Confederate bids me uncover the sacred mem- 
ories that the dust of life's Appian Way hides 
from the tenderest and truest of those whose 
business it is to live and work. For my dead 
comrade of the Valley campaign is one of 



i6 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

many; some of them my friends, some of them 
my pupils as well. The i8th of July, 1861, 
laid low one of my Princeton College room- 
mates; on the 2ist, the day of the great battle, 
the other fell, — both bearers of historic names, 
both upholding the cause of their State with 
as unclouded a conscience as any saint in the 
martyrology ever wore ; and from that day to 
the end, great battle and outpost skirmish 
brought me, week by week, a personal loss in 
men of the same type. 

The surrender of the Spartans on the island 
of Sphacteria was a surprise to friend and foe 
alike ; and the severe historian of the Pelopon- 
nesian war pauses to record the answer of a 
Spartan to the jeering question of one of the 
allies of the Athenians, — a question which im- 
plied that the only brave Spartans were those 
who had been slain. The answer was tipped 
with Spartan wit; the only thing Spartan, as 
some one has said, in the whole un-Spartan 
affair. " The arrow," said he, '* would be 
of great price if it distinguished the brave men 
from the cowards." But it did seem to us, in 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 17 

our passionate grief, that the remorseless bul- 
let, the remorseless shell, had picked out the 
bravest and the purest. It is an old cry, — 

Ja, der Krieg verschlingt die Besten. 

Still, when Schiller says in the poem just 
quoted, 

Ohne Wahl vertheilt die Gaben, 
Ohne Billigkeit das Gluck, 
Denn Patroklus liegt begrabcn 
Und Thersites kommt zuruck, 

his illustration is only half right. The Greek 
Thersites did not return to claim a pension. 

Of course, what was to all true Confederates 
beyond a question " a holy cause," " the hoU^st 
of causes," this fight in defence of " the sacred 
soil " of our native land, was to the other side 
" a wicked rebellion " and " damnable trea- 
son," and both parties to the quarrel were not 
sparing of epithets which, at this distance of 
time, may seem to our children unnecessarily 
undignified; and no doubt some of these epi- 
theta ornantia continue to flourish In remote 
regions, just as pictorial representations of 



i8 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

Yankees and rebels in all their respective 
fiendlshness are still cherished here and there. 
At the Centennial Exposition of 1876, by way 
of conciliating the sections, the place of honour 
In the " Art Annex," was given to Rothermel's 
painting of the battle of Gettysburg, in which 
the face of every dying Union soldier is lighted 
up with a celestial smile, while guilt and despair 
are stamped on the wan countenances of the 
moribund rebels. At least such Is my recol- 
lection of the painting; and I hope that I may 
be pardoned for the malicious pleasure I felt 
when I was Informed of the high price that the 
State of Pennsylvania had paid for that work 
of art. The dominant feeling was amuse- 
ment, not indignation. But as I looked at it I 
recalled another picture of a battle-scene, 
painted by a friend of mine, a French artist, 
who had watched our life with an artist's eye. 
One of the figures In the foreground was a 
dead Confederate boy, lying in the angle of a 
worm fence. His uniform was worn and 
ragged, mud-stained as well as blood-stained; 
the cap which had fallen from his head was a 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 19 

tatter, and the torn shoes were ready to drop 
from his stiffening feet; but in a buttonhole of 
his tunic was stuck the inevitable toothbrush, 
which continued even to the end of the war to 
be the distinguishing mark of gentle nurture, — 
the souvenir that the Confederate so often 
received from fair sympathizers in border 
towns. I am not a realist, but I would not 
exchange that homely toothbrush in the Con- 
federate's buttonhole for the most angelic 
smile that Rothermel's brush could have con- 
jured up. 

Now I make no doubt that most of the 
readers of The Atlantic have got beyond the 
Rothermel stage, and yet I am not certain 
that all of them appreciate the entire clearness 
of conscience with which we of the South went 
into the war, A new patriotism is one of the 
results of the great conflict, and the power of 
local patriotism is no longer felt to the same 
degree. In one of his recent deliverances Mr. 
Carnegie, a canny Scot who has constituted 
himself the representative of American pa- 
triotism, says, " The citizen of the republic 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 



to-day is prouder of being an American than 
he is of being a native of any State in the 
country." What it is to be a native of any 
State in the country, especially an old State 
with an ancient and honorable history, is some- 
thing that Mr. Carnegie cannot possibly un- 
derstand. But the " to-day " is superfluous. 
The Union was a word of power in 1861 as 
it is in 1 89 1. Before the secession of Virginia 
a Virginian Breckinridge asked : " If exiled 
in a foreign land, would the heart turn back to 
Virginia, or South Carolina, or New York, or 
to any one State as the cherished home of its 
pride? No. We would remember only that 
we were Americans." Surely this seems quite 
as patriotic as Mr. Carnegie's utterance; and 
yet, to the native Virginian just quoted, so 
much stronger was the State than the central 
government that, a few weeks after this bold 
speech, he went into the war, and finally per- 
ished in the war. " A Union man," says his 
biographer, " fighting for the rights of his old 
mother, Virginia." And there were many men 
of his mind, noted generals, valiant soldiers. 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 21 

The University Memorial, which records the 
names and lives of the alumni of the University 
of Virginia who fell in the Confederate war, 
two hundred in number, — this volume, full 
" of memories and of sighs " to every South- 
ern man of my age, lies open before me as I 
write, and some of the noblest men who figure 
in its pages were Union men ; and the Memo- 
rial of the Virginia Military Institute tells the 
same story with the same eloquence. The 
State was imperilled, and parties disappeared; 
and of the combatants in the field, some of the 
bravest and the most conspicuous belonged to 
those whose love of the old Union was warm 
and strong, to whom the severance of the tie 
that bound the States together was a personal 
grief. But even those who prophesied the 
worst, who predicted a long and bloody 
struggle and a doubtful result, had no question 
about the duty of the citizen; shared the com- 
mon burden and submitted to the individual 
sacrifice as readily as the veriest fire-eater, — 
nay, as they claimed, more readily. The most 
intimate friend I ever had, who fell after 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 



heroic services, was known by all our circle to 
be utterly at variance with the prevalent South- 
ern view of the quarrel, and died upholding a 
right which was not a right to him except so 
far as the mandate of his State made it a right; 
and while he would have preferred to see " the 
old flag " floating over a united people, he 
restored the new banner to its place time after 
time when it had been cut down by shot and 
shell. 

Those who were bred in the opposite polit- 
ical faith, who read their right of withdrawal 
in the Constitution, had less heart-searching to 
begin with than the Union men of the South; 
but when the State called there were no parties, 
and the only trace of the old difference was 
a certain rivalry which should do the better 
fighting. This ready response to the call of 
the State showed very clearly that, despite 
varying theories of government, the people of 
the Southern States were practically of one 
mind as to the seat of the paramount obliga- 
tion. Adherence to the Union was a matter 
of sentiment, a matter of interest. The argu- 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 23 

ments urged on the South against secession 
were addressed to the memories of the glorious 
struggle for Independence, to the anticipation 
of the glorious future that awaited the united 
country, to the difficulties and the burdens of a 
separate life. Especial stress was laid on the 
last argument; and the expense of a separate 
government, of a standing army, was set forth 
In appalling figures. A Northern student of 
the war once said to me, " If the Southern 
people had been of a statistical turn, there 
would have been no secession, there would 
have been no war." But there were men 
enough of a statistical turn In the South to 
warn the people against the enormous expense 
of Independence, just as there are men enough 
of a statistical turn In Italy to remind the Ital- 
ians of the enormous cost of national unity. 
" Counting the cost " Is In things temporal the 
only wise course, as In the building of a tower; 
but there are times In the life of an Individual, 
of a people, when the things that are eternal 
force themselves Into the calculation, and the 
abacus Is nowhere. " Neither count I my life 



24 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

dear unto myself " is a sentiment that does not 
enter into the domain of statistics. The great 
Athenian statesman who saw the necessity of 
the Peloponnesian war was not above statistics, 
as he showed when he passed in review the re- 
sources of the Athenian empire, the tribute 
from the allies, the treasure laid up in the 
House of the Virgin. But when he addressed 
the people in justification of the war, he based 
his argument, not on a calculation of material 
resources, but on a simple principle of right. 
Submission to any encroachment, the least as 
well as the greatest, on the rights of a State 
means slavery. To us submission meant 
slavery, as it did to Pericles and the Athe- 
nians ; as it did to the great historian of Greece, 
who had learned this lesson from the Pelopon- 
nesian war, and who took sides with the South- 
ern States, to the great dismay of his fellow- 
radicals, who could not see, as George Grote 
saw, the real point at issue in the controversy. 
Submission is slavery, and the bitterest taunt 
in the vocabulary of those who advocated 
secession was " submissionist." But where 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 25 

does submission begin? Who is to mark the 
point of encroachment? That is a matter 
which must be decided by the sovereign; and 
on the theory that the States are sovereign, 
each State must be the judge. The extreme 
Southern States considered their rights men- 
aced by the issue of the presidential election. 
Virginia and the Border States were more de- 
liberate; and Virginia's "pausing" was the 
theme of much mockery in the State and out of 
it, from friend and from foe alike. Her love 
of peace, her love of the Union, were set down 
now to cowardice, now to cunning. The 
Mother of States and Queller of Tyrants was 
caricatured as Mrs. Facing-both-ways ; and the 
great commonwealth that even Mr. Lodge's 
statistics cannot displace from her leadership 
in the history of the country was charged with 
trading on her neutrality. Her solemn pro- 
test was unheeded. The " serried phalanx of 
her gallant sons " that should " prevent the 
passage of the United States forces " was an 
expression that amused Northern critics of 
style as a bit of antiquated Southern rodomon- 



26 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

tade. But the call for troops showed that the 
rodomontade meant something. Virginia had 
made her decision; and if the United States 
forces did not find a serried phalanx barring 
their way, — a serried phalanx is somewhat 
out of date, — they found something that an- 
swered the purpose as well. 

The war began, the war went on. Passion 
was roused to fever heat. Both sides " saw 
red," that physiological condition which to a 
Frenchman excuses everything. The pro- 
verbial good humor of the American people 
did not, it is true, desert the country, and the 
Southern men who were in the field, as they 
were much happier than those who stayed at 
home, if I may judge by my own experience, 
were often merry enough by the camp fire, and 
exchanged rough jests with the enemy's pick- 
ets. But the invaded people were very much 
in earnest, however lightly some of their 
adversaries treated the matter, and as the pres- 
sure of the war grew tighter the more sombre 
did life become. A friend of mine, describing 
the crowd that besieged the Gare de Lyon in 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 27 

Paris, when the circle of fire was drawing 
round the city, and foreigners were hastening 
to escape, told me that the press was so great 
that he could touch in every direction those 
who had been crushed to death as they stood, 
and had not had room to fall. Not wholly 
unlike this was the pressure brought to bear on 
the Confederacy. It was only necessary to 
put out your hand and you touched a corpse; 
and that not an alien corpse, but the corpse of 
a brother or a friend. Every Southern man 
becomes grave when he thinks of that terrible 
stretch of time, partly, it is true, because life 
was nobler, but chiefly because of the mem- 
ories of sorrow and suffering. A professional 
Southern humorist once undertook to write in 
dialect a Comic History of the War, but his 
heart failed him, as his public would have 
failed him, and the serial lived only for a num- 
ber or two. 

The war began, the war went on. War is 
a rough game. It is an omelet that cannot be 
made without breaking eggs, not only eggs 
In esse, but also eggs in posse. So far as I 



28 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

have read about war, ours was no worse than 
some other wars. While it lasted, the conduct 
of the combatants on either side was repre- 
sented in the blackest colors by the other. Even 
the ordinary and legitimate doing to death was 
considered criminal if the deed was done by a 
ruthless rebel or a ruffianly invader. Non- 
combatants were especially eloquent. In de- 
scribing the end of a brother who had been 
killed while trying to get a shot at a Yankee, 
a Southern girl raved about the " murdered 
patriot " and the " dastardly wretch " who 
had anticipated him. But I do not criticize, for 
I remember an English account of the battle of 
New Orleans, in which General Pakenham 
was represented as having been picked off by 
a " sneaking Yankee rifle." Those who were 
engaged In the actual conflict took more rea- 
sonable views, and the annals of the war are 
full of stories of battlefield and hospital in 
which a common humanity asserted Itself. But 
brotherhood there was none. No alienation 
could have been more complete. Into the 
cleft made by the disruption poured all the 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 29 

bad blood that had been breeding from colo- 
nial times, from Revolutionary times, from 
constitutional struggles, from congressional 
debates, from " bleeding Kansas " and the en- 
gine-house at Harper's Ferry; and a great gulf 
was fixed, as it seemed forever, between North 
and South. The hostility was a very satis- 
factory one — for military purposes. 

The war began, the war went on, — this 
politicians' conspiracy, this slaveholders' rebel- 
lion, as it was variously called by those who 
sought its source, now in the disappointed ambi- 
tion of the Southern leaders, now in the desper- 
ate determination of a slaveholding oligarchy 
to perpetuate their power, and to secure for- 
ever their proprietorship in their " human 
chattels." On this theory the mass of Southern 
people were but puppets in the hands of politi- 
cal wirepullers, or blind followers of hectoring 
" patricians." To those who know the South- 
ern people nothing can be more absurd; to 
those who know their personal independence, 
to those who know the deep interest which 
they have always taken in politics, the keen 



30 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

Intelligence with which they have always fol- 
lowed the questions of the day. The court- 
house green was the political university of the 
Southern masses, and the hustings the profes- 
sorial chair, from which the great political 
and economical questions of the day were pre- 
sented, to say the least, as fully and intelli- 
gently as in the newspapers to which so much 
enlightenment is attributed. There was no 
such system of rotten boroughs, no such domi- 
nation of a landed aristocracy, throughout the 
South as has been imagined, and venality, 
which is the disgrace of current politics, was 
practically unknown. The men who repre- 
sented the Southern people in Washington 
came from the people, and not from a ring. 
Northern writers who have ascribed the firm 
control in Congress of the national govern- 
ment which the South held so long to the supe- 
rior character, ability, and experience of its 
representatives, do not seem to be aware that 
the choice of such representatives and their 
prolonged tenure show that in politics, at least, 
the education of the Southerner had not been 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 31 

neglected. The rank and file then were not 
swayed simply by blind passion or duped by 
the representations of political gamesters. 
Nor did the lump need the leavening of the 
large percentage of men of the upper classes 
who served as privates, some of them from the 
beginning to the end of the war. The rank 
and file were, to begin with, in full accord with 
the great principles of the war, and were sus- 
tained by the abiding conviction of the justice 
of the cause. Of course, there were in the 
Southern army, as in every army, many who 
went with the multitude in the first enthusiastic 
rush, or who were brought into the ranks by 
the needful process of conscription; but it is 
not a little remarkable that few of the poorest 
and the most ignorant could be induced to for- 
swear the cause and to purchase release from 
the sufferings of imprisonment by the simple 
process of taking the oath. Those who have 
seen the light of battle on the faces of these 
humble sons of the South, or witnessed their 
steadfastness in camp, on the march, in the 
hospital, have not been ashamed of the 
brotherhood. 



3Z THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

There is such a thing as fighting for a prin- 
ciple, an idea; but principle and idea must be 
incarnate, and the principle of States' rights 
was incarnate in the historical life of the South- 
ern people. Of the thirteen original States, 
Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and 
Georgia were openly and officially upon the 
side of the South. Maryland as a State was 
bound hand and foot. We counted her as 
ours, for the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay 
united as well as divided. Each of these States 
had a history, had an individuality. Every one 
was something more than a certain aggregate 
of square miles wherein dwelt an uncertain 
number of uncertain inhabitants, something 
more than a Territory transformed into a 
State by the magic of political legerdemain; a 
creature of the central government, and duly 
loyal to its creator. 

In claiming this individuality, nothing 
more is claimed for Virginia and for South 
Carolina than would be conceded to Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut ; and we believed then 
that Massachusetts and Connecticut would 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 33 

not have behaved otherwise than we did, If the 
parts had been reversed. The brandished 
sword would have shown what manner of pla- 
cida quies Massachusetts would have ensued, 
If demands had been made on her at all com- 
mensurate with the Federal demands on Vir- 
ginia. These older Southern States were 
proud of their history, and they showed their 
pride by girding at their neighbors. South 
Carolina had her fling at Georgia, her fling at 
North Carolina; and the wish that the little 
State had been scuttled at an early day was a 
plagiarism from classical literature that might 
have emanated from the South as well as from 
the North. Virginia assumed a superiority 
that was resented by her Southern sisters as 
well as by her Northern partners. The Old 
North State derided the pretensions of the 
commonwealths that flanked her on either side, 
and Georgia was not slow to give South Caro- 
lina as good as she sent. All this seemed to 
be harmless banter, but the rivalry was old 
enough and strong enough to encourage the 
hopes of the Union leaders that the Confeder- 



34 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

acy would split along state lines. The cohesive 
power of the Revolutionary war was not suffi- 
ciently strong to make the States sink their con- 
tributions to the common cause in the common 
glory. Washington was the one national 
hero, and yet the Washington Light Infantry 
of Charleston was named, not after the illus- 
trious George, but after his kinsman, William. 
The story of Lexington and Concord and 
Bunker Hill did not thrill the South Caro- 
linian of an earlier day, and those great 
achievements were actually criticized. Who 
were Putnam and Stark that South Carolin- 
ians should worship them, when they had a 
Marion and a Sumter of their own ? Vermont 
went wild, the other day, over Bennington as 
she did not over the centenary of the surrender 
at Yorktown. Take away this local patriot- 
ism and you take out all the color that is left in 
American life. That the local patriotism may 
not only consist with a wider patriotism, but 
may serve as a most important element in 
wider patriotism, is true. Witness the strong 
local life in the old provinces of France. No 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 35 

Student of history, no painter of manners, can 
neglect it. In Gerfaut, a novel written before 
the Franco-Prussian war, Charles de Bernard 
represents an Alsatian shepherd as saying, " I 
am not French; I am Alsatian," — ''trait de 
patriotisme de clocher assez commun dans la 
belle province du Rhin," adds the author, little 
dreaming of the national significance of that 
" patriotisme de clocher." The Breton's love 
of his home is familiar to every one who has 
read his Renan, and Blanche Willis Howard, 
in Guenn, makes her priest exclaim, " Mon- 
sieur, I would fight with France against any 
other nation, but I would fight with Brittany 
against France. I love France. I am a 
Frenchman. But first of all I am a Breton." 
The Provencal speaks of France as if she were 
a foreign country, and fights for her as if she 
were his alone. What is true of France is 
true in a measure of England. Devonshire 
men are notoriously Devonshire men first and 
last. If this is true of what have become in- 
tegral parts of kingdom or republic by cen- 
turies of incorporation, what is to be said of 



36 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

the States that had never renounced their 
sovereignty, that had only suspended it in part? 
The example of state pride set by the older 
States was not lost on the younger Southern 
States, and the Alabamian and the Mississip- 
pian lived in the same faith as did the stock 
from which they sprang; and the community 
of views, of interest, of social order, soon 
made a larger unit and prepared the way for 
a true nationality, and with the nationality a 
great conflict. The heterogeneousness of the 
elements that made up the Confederacy did 
not prove the great source of weakness that 
was expected. The Border States looked on 
the world with different eyes from the Gulf 
States. The Virginia farmer and the Creole 
planter of Louisiana were of different strains; 
and yet there was a solidarity that has never 
failed to surprise the few Northerners who 
penetrated the South for study and pleasure. 
There was an extraordinary ramification of 
family and social ties throughout the Southern 
States, and a few minutes' conversation suf- 
ficed to place any member of the social organ- 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 37 

ism from Virginia to Texas. Great schools, 
like the University of Virginia, within the 
Southern border did much to foster the com- 
munity of feeling, and while there were not a 
few Southerners at Harvard and Yale, and 
while Princeton was almost a Southern col- 
lege, an education In the North did not seem 
to nationalize the Southerner. On the con- 
trary, as in the universities of the Middle 
Ages, groups were formed in accordance with 
nativity; and sectional lines, though effaced at 
certain points, were strengthened at others. 
There may have been a certain broadening of 
view ; there was no weakening of the home ties. 
West Point made fewer converts to this side 
and to that than did the Northern wives of 
Southern husbands, the Southern wives of 
Northern husbands. 

All this is doubtless controvertible, and 
what has been written may serve only to 
amuse or to disgust those who are better 
versed in the facts of our history and keener 
analysts of its laws. All that I vouch for is 
the feeling; the only point that I have tried to 



38 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

make is the simple fact that, right or wrong, 
"^ we were fully persuaded in our own minds, 
and that there was no lurking suspicion of any 
moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could 
be holier than the cause, nothing more impera- 
tive than the duty of upholding it. There 
were those in the South who, when they saw 
the issue of the war, gave up their faith in 
God, but not their faith in the cause. 

It is perfectly possible to be fully persuaded 
in one's own mind without the passionate 
desire to make converts that animates the born 
preacher, and any one may be excused from 
preaching when he recognizes the existence of 
a mental or moral color-blindness with which 
it is not worth while to argue. There is no 
umpire to decide which of the disputants is 
color-blind, and the discussion is apt to degen- 
erate into a wearisome reiteration of points 
which neither party will concede. Now this 
matter of allegiance is just such a question. 
Open the October number of The Atlantic 
and read the sketch of General Thomas, whom 
many military men on the Southern side con- 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 39 

sider to have been the ablest of all the Fed- 
eral generals. He was, as every one knows, a 
Virginian, and it seemed to us that his being a 
Virginian was remembered against him in the 
Federal councils. " His severance," says the 
writer in The Atlantic, " from family and 
State was a keen trial, but ' his duty was clear 
from the beginning.' To his vision there 
was but one country, — the United States of 
America. He had few or no friends at the 
North. Its political policy had not seemed to 
him to be wise. But he could serve under no 
flag except that which he had pledged his 
honor to uphold." Passing over the quiet 
assumption that the North was the United 
States of America, which sufficiently character- 
izes the view of the writer, let us turn to the 
contrast which would at once have suggested 
itself even if it had not been brought forward 
by the eulogist of Thomas. A greater than 
Thomas decided the question at the same time, 
and decided it the other way. To Lee's vision 
there was but one course open to a Virginian, 
and the pledge that he had given when Vir- 



40 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

ginia was one of the United States of America 
had ceased to bind him when Virginia with- 
drew from the compact. His duty was clear 
from the hour when to remain in the army 
would have been to draw his sword against a 
people to whom he was " indissolubly bound." 
These contrasted cases are indeed conve- 
nient tests for color-blindness. There may 
" arise a generation in Virginia," or even a 
generation of Virginians, " who will learn and 
confess " that " Thomas loved Virginia as 
well as the sons she has preferred to honor, 
and served her better." But no representative 
Virginian shares that prophetic vision; the 
color-blindness, on whichever side it is, has 
not yielded to treatment during the twenty- 
five years that have elapsed since the close of 
the war, and may as well be accepted for an 
indefinite period. When social relations were 
resumed between the North and the South, — 
they followed slowly the resumption of busi- 
ness relations, — what we should call the color- 
blindness of the other side often manifested 
itself in a delicate reticence on the part of our 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 41 

Northern friends; and as the war had by 
no means constituted their lives as it had 
constituted ours for four long years, the 
success in avoiding the disagreeable topic 
would have been considerable, if it had not 
been for awkward allusions on the part of the 
Southerners, who, having been shut out for all 
that time from the study of literature and art 
and other elegant and uncompromising sub- 
jects, could hardly keep from speaking of this 
and that incident of the war. Whereupon a 
discreet, or rather an embarrassed silence, as 
if a pardoned convict had playfully referred to 
the arson or burglary, not to say worse, that 
had been the cause of his seclusion. 

Some fifteen years ago Mr. Lowell was 
lecturing in Baltimore, and during the month 
of his stay I learned to know the charm of his 
manner and the delight of his conversation. 
If I had been even more prejudiced than I was, 
I could not have withstood that easy grace, 
that winning cordiality. Every one knew 
where he had stood during the war, and how 
he had wielded the flail of his " lashing hail " 



42 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

against the South and the Southern cause and 
" Southern sympathizers." But that warfare 
was over for him, and out of kindly regard for 
my feelings he made no allusion to the great 
quarrel, with two exceptions. Once, just be- 
fore he left Baltimore, he was talking as no 
other man could talk about the Yankee dialect, 
and turning to me he said with a half smile 
and a deep twinkle in his eye, " I should like 
to have you read what I have written about 
the Yankee dialect, but I am afraid you might 
not like the context." A few days afterwards 
I received from him the well-known preface 
to the Second Series of The Biglow Papers, 
cut out from the volume. It was a graceful 
concession to Southern weakness, and after all 
I may have been mistaken in thinking that I 
could read the Second Series as literature, just 
as I should read the Anti-Jacobin or the Two- 
penny Post Bag. In fact, on looking into the 
Second Series again, I must confess that I can- 
not even now discover the same merits that I 
could not help acknowledging in the First 
Series, which I read for the first time in 1850, 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 43 

when I was a student in Berlin. By that time 
I had recovered from my boyish enthusiasm 
over the Mexican war, and as my party had 
been successful, I could afford to enjoy the wit 
and humor of the book, from the inimitable 
Notices of an Independent Press to the last 
utterance of Birdofredum Sawin; and I have 
always remembered enough of the contents to 
make a psychological study of the Second 
Series a matter of interest, if it were not for 
other things. 

On the second occasion we were passing 
together under the shadow of the Washington 
Monument, and the name of Lee came by 
some chance into the current of talk. Here 
Mr. Lowell could not refrain from expressing 
his view of Lee's course in turning against the 
government to which he had sworn allegiance. 
Doubtless he felt it to be his duty to emphasize 
his conviction as to a vital clause of his creed, 
but it instantly became evident that this was a 
theme that could not be profitably pursued, 
and we walked in silence the rest of the way, — 
the author of the line 

Virginia gave us this imperial man, 



44 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

and the follower of that other imperial man 
Virginia gave the world; both honest, each 
believing the other hopelessly wrong, but abso- 
lutely sincere. 

Scant allusion has been made in this paper 
to the subject of slavery, which bulks so large 
in almost every study of the war. A similar 
scantiness of allusion to slavery is noticeable 
in the Memorial volume, to which I have 
already referred; a volume which was pre- 
pared, not to produce an impression on the 
Northern mind, but to indulge a natural desire 
to honor the fallen soldiers of the Confeder- 
acy; a book written by friends for friends. 
The rights of the State and the defence of the 
country are mentioned at every turn; " the 
peculiar institution " is merely touched on here 
and there, except in one passage in which a 
Virginian speaker maintains that as a matter 
of dollars and cents it would be better for Vir- 
ginia to give up her slaves than to set up a sepa- 
rate government, with all the cost of a stand- 
ing army which the conservation of slavery 
would make necessary. This silence, which 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 45 

might be misunderstood, is plain enough to a 
Southern man. Slavery was simply a test case, 
and except as a test case it is too complicated 
a question to be dealt with at the close of a 
paper which is already too long. Except as a 
test case it is impossible to speak of the South- 
ern view of the institution, for we were not all 
of the same mind. 

There were theorists who maintained that a 
society based on the rock of slavery was the 
best possible in a world where there must be a 
lowest order; and the doctrine of the " mud- 
sill " as propounded by a leading thinker of 
this school evoked mud volcanoes all over the 
North. Scriptural arguments in defence of 
slavery formed a large part of the literature 
of the subject, and the hands of Southern 
clergymen were upheld by their conservative 
brothers beyond the border. 

Some who had read the signs of the times 
otherwise knew that slavery was doomed by 
the voice of the world, and that no theory of 
society could withstand the advance of the 
new spirit; and if the secrets of all hearts 



46 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

could have been revealed, our enemies would 
have been astounded to see how many thou- 
sands and tens of thousands In the Southern 
States felt the crushing burden and the awful 
responsibility of the Institution which we were 
supposed to be defending with the melodra- 
matic fury of pirate kings. We were born to 
this social order, we had to do our duty In it 
according to our lights, and this duty was 
made Indefinitely more difficult by the Inter- 
ference of those who, as we thought, could not 
understand the conditions of the problem, and 
who did not have to bear the expense of the 
experiments they proposed. 

There were the practical men who saw in 
the negro slave an efficient laborer In a certain 
line of work, and there were the practical men 
who doubted the economic value of our system 
as compared with that of the free States, and 
whom the other practical men laughed to 
scorn. 

There was the small and eminently respect- 
able body of benevolent men who promoted 
the scheme of African colonization, of which 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 47 

great things were expected in my boyhood. 
The manifest destiny of slavery in America 
was the regeneration of Africa. 

The people at large had no theory, and the 
practice varied as much in the relation of 
master and servant as it varied in other family 
relations. Too much tragedy and too much 
idyl have been imported into the home life of 
the Southern people ; but this is not the place 
to reduce poetry to prose. 

On one point, however, all parties in the 
South were agreed, and the vast majority of 
the people of the North — before the war. 
The abolitionist proper was considered not 
so much the friend of the negro as the enemy 
of society. As the war went on, and the aboli- 
tionist saw the " glory of the Lord " revealed 
in a way he had never hoped for, he saw at the 
same time, or rather ought to have seen, that 
the order he had lived to destroy could not 
have been a system of hellish wrong and fiend- 
ish cruelty; else the prophetic vision of the 
liberators would have been fulfilled, and the 
horrors of San Domingo would have polluted 



48 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

this fair land. For the negro race does not 
deserve undivided praise for its conduct dur- 
ing the war. Let some small part of the credit 
be given to the masters, not all to the finer 
qualities of their " brothers in black." The 
school in which the training was given is 
closed, and who wishes to open it? Its meth- 
ods were old-fashioned and were sadly behind 
the times, but the old schoolmasters turned 
out scholars who, in certain branches of moral 
philosophy, were not inferior to the graduates 
of the new university. 

I have tried in this paper to reproduce the 
past and its perspective, to show how the men 
of my time and of my environment looked at 
the problems that confronted us. It has been 
a painful and, I fear, a futile task. So far as 
I have reproduced the perspective for myself 
it has been a revival of sorrows such as this 
generation cannot understand; it has recalled 
the hours when it gave one a passion for death, 
a shame of life, to read our bulletins. And 
how could I hope to reproduce that perspec- 
tive for others, for men who belong to another 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 49 

generation and another region, when so many 
men who lived the same hfe and fought on 
the same side have themselves lost the point of 
view not only of the beginning of the war, but 
also of the end of the war, not only of the 
inexpressible exaltation, but of the unutter- 
able degradation? They have forgotten what 
a strange world the survivors of the conflict 
had to face. If the State had been ours still, 
the foundations of the earth would not have 
been out of course ; but the State was a military 
district, and the Confederacy had ceased to 
exist. The generous policy which would have 
restored the State and made a new union pos- 
sible, which would have disentwined much of 
the passionate clinging to the past, was crossed 
by the death of the only man who could have 
carried it through, if even he could have car- 
ried it through; and years of trouble had to 
pass before the current of national life ran 
freely through the Southern States. It was 
before this circuit was complete that the prin- 
cipal of one of the chief schools of Virginia 
set up a tablet to the memory of the " old 



50 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

boys " who had perished In the war, — it was 
a list the length of which few Northern col- 
leges could equal, — and I was asked to fur- 
nish a motto. Those who know classic liter- 
ature at all know that for patriotism and 
friendship mottoes are not far to seek, but 
during the war I felt as I had never felt before 
the meaning of many a classic sentence. The 
motto came from Ovid, whom many call a 
frivolous poet; but the frivolous Roman was 
after all a Roman, and he was young when he 
wrote the line, — too young not to feel the 
generous swell of true feeling. It was written 
of the dead brothers of Briseis : — 

Qui bene pro patria cum patriaque iacent. 

The sentiment found an echo at the time, de- 
served an echo at the time. Now it is a senti- 
ment without an echo, and last year a valued 
personal friend of mine, in an eloquent ora- 
tion, a noble tribute to the memory of our 
great captain, a discourse full of the glory of 
the past, the wisdom of the present, the hope 



THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 51 

of the future, rebuked the sentiment as idle 
in its despair. As well rebuke a cry of anguish, 
a cry of desolation out of the past. For those 
whose names are recorded on that tablet the 
line is but too true. For those of us who sur- 
vive it has ceased to have the import that it 
once had, for we have learned to work reso- 
lutely for the furtherance of all that is good in '^ 
the wider life that has been opened to us by 
the issue of the war, without complaining, 
without repining. That the cause we fought 
for and our brothers died for was the cause '' 
of civil liberty, and not the cause of human 
slavery, is a thesis which we feel ourselves 
bound to maintain whenever our motives are 
challenged or misunderstood, if only for our 
children's sake. But even that will not long 
be necessary, for the vindication of our prin- ^ 
ciples will be made manifest in the working 
out of the problems with which the republic 
has to grapple. If, however, the effacement 
of state lines and the complete centralization 
of the government shall prove to be the wis- 



53 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 

dom of the future, the poetry of life will still 
find its home in the old order, and those who 
loved their State best will live longest in song 
and legend, — song yet unsung, legend not yet 
crystallized. 



A SOUTHERNER IN THE 
PELOPONNESIAN WAR 



A SOUTHERNER IN THE PELOPON- 

NESIAN WAR 



I had intended to call this study Two Wars, 
but I was afraid lest I should be under the 
domination of the title, and an elaborate com- 
parison of the Peloponnesian War and the 
War between the States would undoubtedly 
have led to no little sophistication of the facts. 
Historical parallel bars are usually set up for 
exhibiting feats of mental agility. The mental 
agility is often moral suppleness, and nobody 
expects a critical examination of the parallel- 
ism itself. He was not an historian of the 
first rank, but a phrase-making rhetorician, 
who is responsible for the current saying. 
History is philosophy teaching by examples. 
This definition is about as valuable as some of 
those other definitions that express one art in 
terms of another: poetry in terms of painting. 



56 TWO WARS 



and painting in terms of poetry, " Archi- 
tecture is frozen music " does not enable us to 
understand either perpendicular Gothic or a 
fugue of Bach; and when an historian defines 
history in terms of philosophy, or a philoso- 
pher philosophy in terms of history, you may 
be on the lookout for sophistication. Your 
philosophical historian points his moral by 
adorning his tale. Your historical philosopher 
allows no zigzags in the march of his evolu- 
tion. 

In like manner, the attempt to express one 
war in terms of another is apt to lead to a 
wresting of facts. No two wars are as like as 
two peas. Yet as any two marriages in society 
will yield a certain number of resemblances, so 
will any two wars in history, whether war 
itself be regarded as abstract or concrete, — a 
question that seems to have exercised some 
grammatical minds, and ought therefore to be 
settled before any further step is taken in this 
disquisition, which is the disquisition of a 
grammarian. Now most persons would pro- 
nounce war an abstract, but one excellent 



TWO WARS 57 



manual with which I am acquainted sets it 
down as a concrete, and I have often thought 
that the author must have known something 
practically about war. At all events, to those 
who have seen the midday sun darkened by 
burning homesteads, and wheatfields illumi- 
nated by stark forms in blue and gray, war is 
sufficiently concrete. The very first dead 
soldier one sees, enemy or friend, takes war 
forever out of the category of abstracts. 

When I was a student abroad, American 
novices used to be asked in jest, " Is this your 
first ruin ? " "Is this your first nightingale ? " 
I am not certain that I can place my first ruin 
or my first nightingale, but I can recall my first 
dead man on the battlefield. We were mak- 
ing an advance on the enemy's position near 
Huttonsville. Nothing, by the way, could 
have been more beautiful than the plan, which 
I was privileged to see ; and as we neared the 
objective point, it was a pleasure to watch how 
column after column, marching by this road 
and that, converged to the rendezvous. It 
was as if some huge spider were gathering its 



58 TWO WARS 



legs about the victim. The special order issued 
breathed a spirit of calm resolution worthy of 
the general commanding and his troops. No- 
body that I remember criticised the tautologi- 
cal expression, " The progress of this army 
must be forward." We were prepared for a 
hard fight, for we knew that the enemy was 
strongly posted. Most of us were to be under 
fire for the first time, and there was some talk 
about the chances of the morrow as we lay 
down to sleep. Moralizing of that sort gets 
less and less common with experience in the 
business, and this time the moralizing may 
have seemed to some premature. But wher- 
ever the minie ball sang its diabolical mosquito 
song there was death in the air, and I was soon 
to see brought into camp, under a flag of truce, 
the lifeless body of the heir of Mount Vernon, 
whose graceful riding I had envied a few days 
before. However, there was no serious fight- 
ing. The advance on the enemy's position 
had developed more strength in front than 
we had counted on, or some of the spider's legs 
had failed to close in. A misleading report 



TJVO WARS 59 



had been brought to headquarters. A weak 
point in the enemy's line had been reinforced. 
Who knows? The best laid plans are often 
thwarted by the merest trifles, — an insignifi- 
cant puddle, a jingling canteen. This game of 
war is a hit or miss game, after all. A certain 
fatalism is bred thereby, and it is well to set 
out with a stock of that article. So our reso- 
lute advance became a forced reconnaissance, 
greatly to the chagrin of the younger and more 
ardent spirits. We found out exactly where 
the enemy was, and declined to have anything 
further to do with him for the time being. 
But in finding him we had to clear the ground 
and drive in the pickets. One picket had been 
posted at the end of a loop in a chain of valleys. 
The road we followed skirted the base of one 
range of hills. The house which served as the 
headquarters of the picket was on the other 
side. A meadow as level as a board stretched 
between. I remember seeing a boy come out 
and catch a horse, while we were advancing. 
Somehow it seemed to be a trivial thing to do 
just then. I knew better afterwards. Our 



6o TJVO WARS 



skirmishers had done their work, had swept 
the woods on either side clean, and the pickets 
had fallen back on the main body; but not all 
of them. One man, if not more, had only had 
time to fall dead. The one I saw, the first, was 
a young man, not thirty, I should judge, lying 
on his back, his head too low for comfort. He 
had been killed outright, and there was no dis- 
tortion of feature. No more peaceful faces 
than one sees at times on the battlefield, and 
sudden death, despite the Litany, is not the 
least enviable exit. In this case there was 
something like a mild surprise on the counte- 
nance. The rather stolid face could never 
have been very expressive. An unposted let- 
ter was found on the dead man's body. It was 
written in German, and I was asked to inter- 
pret it, in case it should contain any important 
information. There was no important infor- 
mation; just messages to friends and kindred, 
just the trivialities of camp life. 

The man was an invader, and in my eyes 
deserved an invader's doom. If sides had 
been changed, he would have been a rebel, and 



TWO WARS 6 1 



would have deserved a rebel's doom. I was 
not stirred to the depths by the sight, but it 
gave me a lesson in grammar, and war has ever 
been concrete to me from that time on. The 
horror I did not feel at first grew steadily. 
" A sweet thing," says Pindar, " is war to 
those that have not tried it." 

II 

Concrete or abstract, there are general re- 
semblances between any two wars, and so war 
lends itself readily to allegories. Every one 
has read Bunyan's Holy War. Not every 
one has read Spangenberg's Grammatical 
War. It is an ingenious performance, which 
fell into my hands many years after I had gone 
forth to see and to feci what war was like. In 
Spangenberg's Grammatical War the nouns 
and the verbs are the contending parties. 
Poeta is king of the nouns, and Amo king of 
the verbs. There is a regular debate between 
the two sovereigns. The king of the verbs 
summons the adverbs to his help, the king of 



62 TWO WARS 



the nouns the pronouns. The camps are 
pitched, the forces marshalled. The neutral 
power, participle, is invoked by both parties, 
but declines to send open assistance to either, 
hoping that in this contest between noun and 
verb the third party will acquire the rule over 
the whole territory of language. After a final 
summons on the part of the king of the verbs, 
and a fierce response from the rival monarch, 
active hostilities begin. We read of raids and 
forays. Prisoners are treated with contumely, 
and their skirts are docked as in the Biblical 
narrative. Treachery adds excitement to the 
situation. Skirmishes precede the great en- 
gagement, in which the nouns are worsted, 
though they have come off with some of the 
spoils of war ; and peace is made on terms dic- 
tated by Priscian, Servius, and Donatus. 
Spangenberg's Grammatical War is a not un- 
interesting, not uninstructive squib, and the 
salt of it, or saltpetre of it, has not all evapo- 
rated after the lapse of some three centuries. 
There are bits that remind one of the Greco- 
Turkish war of a few weeks ago. 



TIVO WARS 63 



But there is no military science in Bunyan's 
Holy War nor in Spangenberg's Grammatical 
War: why should there be? Practical war- 
fare is rough work. To frighten, to wound, 
to kill, — these three abide under all forms of 
military doctrine, and the greatest of these is 
frightening. Ares, the god of war, has two 
satellites. Terror and Affright. Fear is the 
Gorgon's head. The serpents are very real, 
very effective, in their way, but logically they 
are unessential tresses. The Gorgon stares 
you out of countenance, and that suffices. The 
object is the removal of an obstacle. Killing 
and wounding are but means to an end. 
Hand-to-hand fighting is rare, and it would be 
easy to count the instances in which cavalry 
meets the shock of cavalry. Crossing sabres 
is not a common pastime in the red game of 
war. It makes a fine picture, to be sure, the 
finer for the rarity of the thing itself. 

To frighten, to wound, to kill, being the 
essential processes, war amounts to the same 
thing the world over, world of time and world 
of space. Whether death or disability comes 



64 TWO WARS 



by Belgian ball or Spencer bullet, by the stone 
of a Balearic slinger, by a bolt from a cross- 
bow, is a matter of detail which need not 
trouble the philosophic mind, and the ancients 
showed their sense in ascribing fear to divine 
inspiration. 

If the processes of war are primitive, the 
causes of war are no less so. It has been strik- 
ingly said of late by a Scandinavian scholar 
that " language was born in the courting-days 
of mankind: the first utterance of speech 
<was> something between the nightly love- 
lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the melo- 
dious love-songs of the nightingale." " War, 
the father of all things," goes back to 
the same origin as language. The serenade 
is matched by the battle-cry. The fight be- 
tween two cock-pheasants for the love of a 
hen-pheasant is war in its last analysis, in its 
primal manifestation. Selfish hatred is at the 
bottom of it. It is the hell-fire to which we 
owe the heat that is necessary to some of the 
noblest as to some of the vilest manifesta- 
tions of human nature. Righteous indigna- 



TWO WARS 6$ 



tion, sense of injustice, sympathy with the 
oppressed, consecration to country, fine words 
all, fine things, but so many of the men who 
represent these fine things perish. It wrings 
the heart at a distance of more than thirty 
years to think of those who have fallen, and 
love still maintains passionately that they were 
the best. At any rate, they were among the 
best, and both sides are feeling the loss to this 
day, not only in the men themselves, but in the 
sons that should have been born to them. 

Any two wars, then, will yield a sufficient 
number of resemblances, in killed, wounded, 
and missing, in the elemental matter of hatred, 
or, if you choose to give it a milder name, 
rivalry. These things are of the essence of 
war, and the manifestations run parallel even 
in the finer lines. One cock-pheasant finds the 
drumming of another cock-pheasant a very 
irritating sound. Chanticleer objects to the 
note of Chanticleer, and the more articulate 
human being is rasped by the voice of his 
neighbor. The Attic did not like the broad 
Boeotian speech. Parson Evans's " seese and 



66 TWO WARS 



putter " were the bitterest ingredients in Fal- 
staff's dose of humiliation. " Yankee twang " 
and " Southern drawl " incited as well as 
echoed hostility. 

Borderers are seldom friends. " An Attic 
neighbor " is a Greek proverb. Kentucky and 
Ohio frown at each other across the river. 
Cincinnati looks down on Covington, and Cov- 
ington glares at Cincinnati. Aristophanes, in 
his mocking way, attributes the Peloponnesian 
war to a kidnapping affair between Athens 
and Megara. The underground railroad pre- 
ceded the aboveground railroad in the history 
of the great American conflict. 

There were jealousies enough between 
Athens and Sparta in the olden times, which 
correspond to our colonial days, and in the 
Persian war, which was in a sense the Greek 
war of independence. In like manner the 
chronicles of our Revolutionary period show 
that there was abundance of bad blood between 
Northern colonies and Southern colonies. The 
Virginian planter whom all have agreed to 
make the one national hero was after all a 



TWO WARS 67 



Virginian, and Virginians have not forgotten 
the impatient utterances of the " imperial 
man " on the soil of Massachusetts and in the 
streets of New York. Nobody takes Knicker- 
bocker's History of New York seriously, as 
owlish historians are wont to take Aris- 
tophanes. Why not? We accept the hostility 
of Attica and Boeotia, of Attica and Megara; 
and there are no more graphic chapters than 
those which set forth the enmity between New 
York and Maryland, between New Amster- 
dam and Connecticut. 

Business is often more potent than blood. 
Nullification, the forerunner of disunion, rose 
from a question of tariff. The echoes had not 
died out when I woke to conscious life. I 
knew that I was the son of a nullifier, and the 
nephew of a Union man. It was whispered 
that our beloved family physician found it 
prudent to withdraw from the public gaze 
for a while, and that my uncle's windows were 
broken by the palmettoes of a nullification 
procession; and I can remember from my 
boyhood days how unreconciled citizens of 



68 TWO WARS 



Charleston shook their fists at the revenue 
cutter and its " foreign flag." Such an early 
experience enables one to understand our war 
better. It enables one to understand the Pelo- 
ponnesian war better, the struggle between the 
union of which Athens was the mistress and 
the confederacy of which Sparta was the head. 
Non-Intercourse between Athens and Megara 
was the first stage. The famous Megarian 
decree of Pericles, which closed the market of 
Athens to Megarians, gave rise to angry con- 
troversy, and the refusal to rescind that decree 
led to open war. But Megara was little more 
than a pretext. The subtle influence of Corinth 
was potent. The great merchant city of 
Greece dreaded the rise of Athens to dominant 
commercial importance, and in the conflict be- 
tween the Corinthian brass and the Attic clay, 
the clay was shattered, Corinth does not show 
her hand much in the Peloponnesian war. She 
figures at the beginning, and then disappears. 
But the old mole is at work the whole time, 
and what the Peloponnesians called the Attic 
war, and the Attics the Peloponnesian war, 



TWO WARS 69 



might have been called the Corinthian war. 
The exchange, the banking-house, were impor- 
tant factors then as now. " Sinews of war " 
is a classical expression. The popular cry of 
*' Persian gold " was heard in the Pelopon- 
nesian war as the popular cry of " British 
gold " is heard now. 

True, there was no slavery question in the 
Peloponnesian war, for antique civilization 
without slavery is hardly thinkable ; but after 
all, the slavery question belongs ultimately to 
the sphere of economics. The humanitarian 
spirit, set free by the French Revolution, was 
at work in the Southern States as in the North- 
ern States, but it was hampered by economic 
considerations. Virginia, as every one knows, 
was on the verge of becoming a free State. 
Colonization flourished in my boyhood. A 
friend of my father's left him trustee for his 
" servants," as we called them. They were 
quartered opposite our house in Charleston, 
and the pickaninnies were objects of profound 
interest to the children of the neighborhood. 
One or two letters came from the emigrants 



70 TWO WARS 



after they reached Liberia. Then silence fell 
on the African farm. 

Some of the most effective anti-slavery re- 
formers were Charlestonians by birth and 
> breeding. I cannot say that Grimke was a 
popular name, but homage was paid to the 
talent of Frederick, as I remember only too 
well, for I had to learn a speech of his by 
heart, as a schoolboy exercise. But the eco- 
nomic conditions of the South were not 
favorable to the spread of the ideas repre- 
sented by the Grimkes. The slavery question 
kept alive the spirit that manifested itself in 
the tariff question. State rights were not suf- 
fered to slumber. The Southerner resented 
Northern dictation as Pericles resented Lace- 
daemonian dictation, and our Peloponnesian 
war began. 

Ill 

The processes of the two wars, then, were 
the same, — killing, wounding, frightening. 
The causes of the two wars resolved them- 



TWO WARS 71 



selves into the elements of hatred. The de- 
tails of the two wars meet at many points; 
only one must be on one's guard against merely 
fanciful, merely external resemblances. 

In i860 I spent a few days in Holland, and 
among my various excursions in that fascinat- 
ing country I took a solitary trip on a treck- 
schuit from Amsterdam to Delft. Holland 
was so true to Dutch pictures that there was a 
retrospective delight in the houses and in the 
people. There was a charm in the very signs, 
in the names of the villas; for my knowledge 
of Dutch had not passed beyond the stage at 
which the Netherlandish tongue seems to be 
an English-German Dictionary, disguised in 
strong waters. But the thing that struck me 
most was the general aspect of the country. 
Everywhere gates. Nowhere fences. The 
gates guarded the bridges and the canals were 
the fences, but the canals and the low bridges 
were not to be seen at a distance, and the 
visual effect was that of isolated gates. It was 
an absurd landscape even after the brain had 
made the necessary corrections. 



72 TWO WARS 



In the third year of the war I was not far 
from Fredericksburg. The country had been 
stripped, and the forlorn region was a sad con- 
trast to the smug prosperity of Holland. And 
yet of a sudden the Dutch landscape flashed 
upon my inward eye, for Spottsylvania, like 
Holland, was dotted with fenceless gates. The 
rails of the inclosures had long before gone to 
feed bivouac fires, but the great gates were too 
solidly constructed to tempt marauders. It 
was an absurd landscape, an absurd parallel. 

Historical parallels are often no better. 
When one compares two languages of the same 
family, the first impression is that of similarity. 
It is hard for the novice to keep his Italian and 
his Spanish apart. The later and more abid- 
ing impression is that of dissimilarity. A total 
stranger confounds twins in whom the mem- 
bers of the household find but vague likeness. 
There is no real resemblance between the two 
wars we are contemplating outside the inevi- 
table features of all armed conflicts, and we 
must be on our guard against the sophistica- 
tion deprecated in the beginning of this study. 



TWO WARS 73 



And yet one coming fresh to a comparison of 
the Peloponnesian war and the war between 
the States might see a striking similarity, such 
as I saw between the Dutch landscape and the 
landscape in Spottsylvania. 

The Peloponnesian war, like our war, was 
a war between two leagues, a Northern Union 
and a Southern Confederacy. The Northern 
Union, represented by Athens, was a naval 
power. The Southern Confederacy, under 
the leadership of Sparta, was a land power. 
The Athenians represented the progressive 
element, the Spartans the conservative. The 
Athenians believed in a strong centralized 
government. The Lacedaemonians professed 
greater regard for autonomy. A little inge- 
nuity, a good deal of hardihood, might multi- 
ply such futilities indefinitely. In fact, it 
would be possible to write the story of our 
Peloponnesian war in phrases of Thucydides, 
and I should not be surprised if such a task 
were a regular school exercise at Eton or at 
Rugby. Why, it was but the other day that 
Professor Tyrrell, of Dublin, translated a pas- 



74 TWO WARS 



sage from Lowell's BIglow Papers into choice 
Aristophanese. 

Unfortunately, such feats, as I have already 
said, imperil one's intellectual honesty, and 
one would not like to imitate the Byzantine 
historians who were given to similar tricks. 
One of these gentlemen, Choricius by name, 
had a seaport to describe. How the actual 
seaport lay mattered little to Choricius, so 
long as the Epidamnus of Thucydides was at 
hand; and if the task of narrating our Pelo- 
ponnesian war were assigned to the ghost of 
Choricius, I have no doubt that he would open 
it with a description of Charleston in terms 
of Epidamnus. Little matters of topography 
would not trouble such an one. To the sophist 
an island is an island, a river a river, a height 
a height, everywhere. Sphacteria would fur- 
nish the model for Morris Island; the Ache- 
lous would serve indifferently for Potomac or 
Mississippi, the Epipolae for Missionary 
Ridge, Plataea for Vicksburg, the harbor of 
Syracuse for Hampton Roads; and Thucydi- 
des' description of the naval engagement and 



TlfO WARS 75 



the watching crowds would be made available 
for the fight between Merrimac and Monitor. 
The debates In Thucydides would be a 
quarry for the debates in either Congress, as 
they had been a quarry for centuries of rhetori- 
cal historians. And as for the " winged 
words," why should they have wings, if not to 
flit from character to character? A well- 
known scholar, at a loss for authentic details 
as to the life of Pindar, fell back on a lot of 
apophthegms attributed to his hero, and in so 
doing maintained the strange doctrine that 
apophthegms were more to be trusted than 
any other form of tradition. There could not 
have been a more hopeless thesis. The gen- 
eral who said that he would burn his coat if 
it knew his plans has figured in all the wars 
with which I have been contemporary, was a 
conspicuous character in the Mexican war, and 
passed from camp to camp in the war between 
the States. The mot, familiar to the classical 
scholar, was doubtless attributed in his day to 
that dashing sheik Chedorlaomer, and will be 
ascribed to both leaders in the final battle of 



76 TfVO WARS 



Armageddon. The hank of yarns told about 
Socrates is pieced out with tabs and tags bor- 
rowed from different periods. I have heard, 
say, in the afternoon, a good story at the ex- 
pense of a famous American revival preacher 
which I had read that morning in the Cent 
Nouvelles Nouvelles, and there is a large 
stock of anecdotes made to screw on and screw 
off for the special behoof of college presidents 
and university professors. Why hold up Cho- 
ricius to ridicule? He was no worse than 
others of his guild. It was not Choricius, it 
was another Byzantine historian who con- 
veyed from Herodotus an unsavory retort, 
over which the unsuspecting Gibbon chuckles 
in the dark cellar of his notes, where he keeps 
so much of his high game. The Greek his- 
torian of the Roman Empire, the Roman his- 
torian of every date, are no better, and Dio- 
nysius of Halicarnassus, who has devoted 
many pages to the arraignment of Thucydi- 
des' style, cribs with the utmost composure 
from the author he has vilipended. Still, we 
must not set down every coincidence as bor- 



TWO WARS 77 



rowing. Thucydides himself insists on the re- 
currence of the same or similar events in a his- 
tory of which human nature is a constant 
factor. " Undo this button " is not necessarily 
a quotation from King Lear. " There is no 
way but this " was original with Macaulay, 
and not stolen from Shakespeare. " Never 
mind, general, all this has been my fault," are 
words attributed to General Lee after the bat- 
tle of Gettysburg. This is very much the lan- 
guage of Gylippus after the failure of his 
attack on the Athenian lines before Syracuse. 
How many heroic as well as unheroic natures 
have had to say " Mea culpa, mea maxima 
culpa." 

Situations may recur, sayings may recur, 
but no characters come back. Nature always 
breaks her mould. " I could not help mutter- 
ing to myself," says Coleridge in his Bio- 
graphia Literaria, " when the good pastor 
this morning told me that Klopstock was the 
German Milton ' a very German Milton, in- 
deed! 11 ' " and Coleridge's italics and three 
exclamation points may answer for all paral- 

6 



78 TJVO WARS 



lelisms. When historical characters get far 
enough off it may be possible to imitate Plu- 
tarch, but only then. Victor Hugo wrote a 
passionate protest against the execution of 
John Brown, in which he compared Virginia 
hanging John Brown with Washington putting 
Spartacus to death. What Washington would 
have done with Spartacus can readily be 
divined. Those who have stood nearest to 
Grant and Sherman, to Lee and Jackson, the 
men, fail to see any strong resemblance to 
leaders in other wars. Nicias, in the Pelopon- 
nesian war, whose name means Winfield, has 
nothing in common with General Scott, whose 
plan of putting down the rebellion, the " Ana- 
conda Plan," as it was called, bears some re- 
semblance to the scheme of Demosthenes, the 
Athenian general, for quelling the Pelopon- 
nese. Brasidas was in some respects lilce 
Stonewall Jackson, but Brasidas was not a 
Presbyterian elder, nor Stonewall Jackson a 
cajoling diplomatist. 



TWO WARS 79 



IV 

This paper is rapidly becoming what life 
is, — a series of renunciations, — and the reader 
is by this time sufficiently enlightened as to the 
reasons why I gave up the ambitious title Two 
Wars, and substituted A Southerner in the 
Peloponnesian War. If I were a military 
man, I might have been tempted to draw some 
further illustrations from the history of the 
two struggles, but my short and desultory serv- 
ice in the field does not entitle me to set up as a 
strategist. I went from my books to the front, 
and went back from the front to my books, 
from the Confederate war to the Pelopon- 
nesian war, from Lee and Early to Thucydides 
and Aristophanes. I fancy that I understood 
my Greek history and my Greek authors better 
for my experience in the field, but some degree 
of understanding would have come to me even 
if I had not stirred from home. For while my 
home was spared until the month preceding 
the surrender, every vibration of the great 
struggle was felt at the foot of the Blue Ridge. 



8o TJVO WARS 



We were not too far off to sympathize with 
the scares at Richmond, There was the 
Pawnee affair, for instance. Early in the war 
all Richmond was stirred by the absurd report 
that the Pawnee was on its way up James 
River to lay the Confederate capital in ashes, 
just as all Athens was stirred. In the early part 
of the Peloponnesian war, by a naval demon- 
stration against the Piraeus. The Pawnee 
war, as it was jocularly called, did not last 
long. Shot-guns and revolvers, to which the 
civilian soul naturally resorts in every time of 
trouble, were soon laid aside, and the only 
artillery to which the extemporized warriors 
were exposed was the artillery of jests. Even 
now survivors of those days recur to the 
tumultuous excitement of that Pawnee Sunday 
as among the memorable things of the war, 
and never without merriment. Perhaps no- 
body expected serious resistance to be made 
by the clergymen and the department clerks 
and the business men who armed themselves 
for the fray. Home guards were familiar 
butts on both sides of the line, but home guards 



TWO JVARS 8i 



have been known to die in battle, and death 
in battle is supposed to be rather tragic than 
otherwise. Nor is the tragedy made less tragic 
by the age of the combatant. The ancients 
thought a young warrior dead something fair 
to behold. To Greek poet and Roman poet 
alike an aged warrior is a pitiable spectacle. 
No one is likely to forget Virgil's Priam, Tyr- 
t£Eus' description of an old soldier on the field 
of battle came up to me more than once, and 
there is stamped forever on my mind the Image 
of one dying Confederate, " with white hair 
and hoary beard, breathing out his brave soul 
in the dust " on the western bank of the fair 
Shenandoah. Yet a few weeks before, that 
same old Confederate, as a member of the 
awkward squad, would have been a legitimate 
object of ridicule; and so the heroes of the 
Pawnee war, the belted knights, or knights 
who would have been belted could belts have 
been found for their civic girth, were twitted 
with their heroism. 

But our scares were not confined to scares 
that came from Richmond. One cavalry raid 



82 TWO WARS 



came up to our very doors, and Custer and his 
men were repelled by a handful of reserve 
artillerymen. Our home guard was sum- 
moned more than once to defend Rockfish 
Gap, and I remember one long summer night 
spent as a mounted picket on the road to Pal- 
myra. Every battle in that " dancing ground 
of war " brought to the great Charlottesville 
hospital sad reinforcements of wounded men. 
Crutch-races between one-legged soldiers were 
organized, and there were timber-toe qua- 
drilles and one-armed cotillions. Out of the 
shelter of the Blue Ridge it was easy enough 
to get into the range of bullets. A semblance 
of college life was kept up at the University of 
Virginia. The students were chiefly maimed 
soldiers and boys under military age ; but when 
things grew hot in front, maimed soldiers 
would edge nearer to the hell of battle and the 
boys would rush oft to the game of powder and 
ball. One little band of these college boys 
chose an odd time for their baptism of fire, and 
were put into action during the famous fight 
of " the bloody angle." From the night when 



TWO WARS 83 



word was brought that the Federals had occu- 
pied Alexandria to the time when I hobbled 
into the provost marshal's office at Charlottes- 
ville and took the oath of allegiance, the war 
was part of my life, and it is not altogether 
surprising that the memories of the Confeder- 
acy come back to me whenever I contemplate 
the history of the Peloponneslan war, which 
bulks so largely in all Greek studies. And 
that is all this paper really means. It belongs 
to the class of inartistic performances of which 
Aristotle speaks so slightingly. It has no 
unity except the accidental unity of person. A 
Southerner in the Peloponnesian War has no 
more artistic right to be than A Girl in the 
Carpathians or A Scholar in Politics, and yet 
it may serve as a document. But what will 
not serve as a document to the modern his- 
torian? The historian is no longer the poor 
creature described by Aristotle. He is no an- 
nalist, no chronicler. He is not dragged along 
by the mechanical sequence of events. " The 
master of them that know " did not know 
everything. He did not know that history 



84 TWO WARS 



was to become as plastic as poetry, as dramatic 
as a play. 

V 

The war was a good time for the study of 
the conflict between Athens and Sparta. It 
was a great time for reading and re-reading 
classical literature generally, for the South 
was blockaded against new books as effect- 
ively, almost, as Megara was blockaded 
against garlic and salt. The current literature 
of those three or four years was a blank to 
most Confederates. Few books got across the 
line. A vigorous effort was made to supply 
our soldiers with Bibles and parts of the Bible, 
and large consignments ran the blockade. 
Else little came from abroad, and few books 
were reprinted in the Confederacy. Of these 
I recall especially Bulwer's Strange Story; 
Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, popularly pro- 
nounced " Lee's Miserables " ; and the his- 
torical novels of Louise Miihlbach, known to 
the Confederate soldier as " Lou Mealbag." 



TWO WARS 85 



All were eagerly read, but Cosette and Fantlne 
and Joseph the Second would not last forever, 
and we fell back on the old stand-bys. Some 
of us exhumed neglected treasures, and I re- 
member that I was fooled by Bulwer's com- 
mendation of Charron Into reading that 
feebler Montaigne. The Southerner, always 
conservative in his tastes and no great admirer 
of American literature, which had become 
largely alien to him, went back to his English 
classics, his ancient classics. Old gentlemen 
past the military age furbished up their Latin 
and Greek. Some of them had never let their 
Latin and Greek grow rusty. When I was 
serving on General Gordon's staff, I met at 
Millwood, in Clarke County, a Virginian of 
the old school who declaimed with fiery 
emphasis, in the original, choice passages 
of Demosthenes' tirade against ^schines. 
Not Demosthenes himself could have given 
more effective utterance to " Hearest thou, 
iEschines?" I thought of my old friend 
again not so very long ago, when I read the 
account that the most brilliant of modern Ger- 



86 TfVO WARS 



man classicists gives of his encounter with a 
French schoolmaster at Beauvais in 1 870, dur- 
ing the Franco- Prussian war, and of the heated 
discussion that ensued about the comparative 
merits of Euripides and Racine. The book- 
man is not always killed In a man by service 
in the field. True, Lachmann dropped his 
Propertius to take up arms for his country, but 
Relsig annotated his Aristophanes In camp, 
and everybody knows the story of Courier, the 
soldier Hellenist. But the tendency of life 
In the open air Is to make the soul Imbody and 
Imbrute, and after a while one begins to think 
scholarship a disease, or, at any rate, a bad 
habit; and the Scythian nomad, or. If you 
choose, the Texan cowboy, seems to be the nor- 
mal, healthy type. You put your Pickering 
Homer in your kit. It drops out by reason of 
some sudden change of base, and you do not 
mourn as you ought to do. The fact is you 
have not read a line for a month. But when 
the Confederate volunteer returned, let us say, 
from Jack's Shop or some such homely local- 
ity, and opened his Thucydides, the old charm 



TWO WARS 87 



came back with the studious surroundings, and 
the familiar first words renewed the spell. 

" Thucydides of Athens wrote up the war 
of the Peloponnesians and Athenians." " The 
war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians " is 
a somewhat lumbering way of saying " the 
Peloponnesian war." But Thucydides never 
says " the Peloponnesian war." Why not? 
Perhaps his course in this matter was deter- 
mined by a spirit of judicial fairness. How- 
ever that may be, either he employs some 
phrase like the one cited, or he says " this 
war " as we say " the war," as if there were 
no other war on record. " Revolutionary 
war," "war of 18 12," "Seminole war," 
" Mexican war," — all these run glibly from 
our tongues, but we also lumber when we wish 
to be accurate. The names of wars, like the 
names of diseases, are generally put off on the 
party of the other part. We say " French and 
Indian war " without troubling ourselves to 
ask what the French and Indians called it, but 
" Northern war " and " Southern war " were 
never popular designations. " The war be- 



88 TWO WARS 



tween the States," which a good many South- 
erners prefer, is both bookish and inexact. 
" Civil war " is an utter misnomer. It was 
used and is still used by courteous people, the 
same people who are careful to say " Federal " 
and " Confederate." " War of the rebel- 
lion," which begs the very question at issue, has 
become the official designation of the struggle, 
but has found no acceptance with the van- 
quished. To this day no Southerner uses it 
except by way of quotation, as in Rebellion 
Record, and even in the North it was only by 
degrees that " reb " replaced " secesh." " Se- 
cession " was not a word with which to charm 
the " old-line Whigs " of the South. They 
would fight the battles of the secessionists, but 
they would not bear their name. " The war of 
secession " is still used a good deal in foreign 
books, but it has no popular hold. " The 
war," without any further qualification, served 
the turn of Thucydides and Aristophanes for 
the Peloponnesian war. It will serve ours, 
let it be hoped, for some time to come. 



TIVO WARS 89 



VI 

A Confederate commentary on Thucydi- 
des, on the scale of the remarks just made on 
the name of the war, would outrun the lines of 
this study. Let us pass from Thucydides to 
the other contemporary chronicler who turns 
out some sides of the " Doric war " about 
which Thucydides is silent. The antique 
Clio gathers up her robe and steps tiptoe 
over rubbishy details that are the delight of 
the comic poet and the modern Muse of His- 
tory. Thucydides, it is true, gives us a minute 
account of the plague. That was a subject 
which commended itself to his saturnine spirit, 
and in his description he deigns to speak of the 
" stuffy cabooses " into which the country 
people were crowded when the Lacedaemo- 
nians invaded Attica. But when Aristophanes 
touches the same chapter, he goes into pictur- 
esque details about the rookeries and the wine- 
jars inhabited by the newcomers. Diogenes' 
jar, commonly misnamed a tub, was no inven- 
tion, and I have known less comfortable quar- 



90 TfVO WARn 



ters than the hogshead which I occupied for a 
day or two in one of my outings during the 
war. 

The plague was too serious a matter for 
even Aristophanes to make fun of, and the 
annahst of the war between the States will not 
find any parallel in the chronicles of the South. 
There was no such epidemic as still shows its 
livid face in the pages of Thucydides and the 
verses of Lucretius. True, some diseases of 
which civic life makes light proved to be veri- 
table scourges in camp. Measles was espe- 
cially fatal to the country-bred, and for abject 
misery I have never seen anything like those 
cases of measles in which nostalgia had super- 
vened. Nostalgia, which we are apt to sneer 
at as a doctor's name for homesickness, and to 
class with cachexy and borborygmus, was a 
power for evil in those days, and some of our 
finest troops were thinned out by it, noto- 
riously the North Carolinians, whose attach- 
ment to the soil of their State was as passion- 
ate as that of any Greeks, ancient or modern, 
Attic or Peloponnesian. 



TWO WARS 91 



But the frightful mortality of the camp does 
not strike the imagination so forcibly as does 
the carnage of the battlefield, and no layman 
cares to analyze hospital reports and compare 
the medical with the surgical history of the 
war. Famine, the twin evil of pestilence, is 
not so easily forgotten, and the dominant note 
of Aristophanes, hunger, was the dominant 
note of life in the Confederacy, civil as well as 
military. The Confederate soldier was often 
on short rations, but the civilian was not much 
better off. I do not mean those whose larders 
were swept by the besom of the invaders. 
" Not a dust of flour, not an ounce of meat, 
left in the house," was not an uncommon cry 
along the line of march ; but it was heard else- 
where, and I remember how I raked up ex- 
amples of European and Asiatic frugality with 
which to reinforce my editorials and hearten 
my readers, — the scanty fare of the French 
peasant, the raw oatmeal of the Scotch stone- 
cutter, the flinty bread of the Swiss moun- 
taineer, the Spaniard's cloves of garlic, the 
Greek's handful of olives, and the Hindoo's 



92 TWO IVARS 



handful of rice. The situation was often 
gayly accepted. The not infrequent procla- 
mation of fastdays always served as a text for 
mutual banter, and starvation-parties were the 
rule, social gatherings at which apples were 
the chief refreshment. Strange streaks of 
luxury varied this dead level of scant and plain 
fare. The stock of fine wines, notably ma- 
deiras, for which the South was famous, did 
not all go to the hospitals. Here and there 
provident souls had laid in boxes of tea and 
bags of coffee that carried them through the 
war, and the chief outlay was for sugar, which 
rose in price as the war went on, until it almost 
regained the poetical character it bore in 
Shakespeare's time. Sugar, tea, and coffee 
once compassed, the daintiness of old times 
occasionally came back, and I have been as- 
sured by those who brought gold with them 
that Richmond was a paradise of cheap and 
good living during the war, just as the United 
States will be for foreigners when our cur- 
rency becomes as abundant as it was in the last 
years of the Confederacy. Gresham's law 



TWO JFARS 93 



ought to be called Aristophanes' law. In all 
matters pertaining to the sphere of civic life, 
merry Aristophanes is of more value than 
sombre Thucydides, and if the gospel of peace 
which he preaches is chiefly a variation on the 
theme of something to eat, small blame to him. 
Critics have found fault with the appetite of 
Odysseus as set forth by Homer. No Confed- 
erate soldier will subscribe to the censure, 
and there are no scenes in Aristophanes that 
appeal more strongly to the memory of the 
Southerner, civilian or soldier, than those in 
which the pinch of war makes itself felt. 

Farmers and planters made their moan dur- 
ing the Confederacy, and doubtless they had 
much to suffer. " Impressment " is not a 
pleasant word at any time, and the tribute that 
the countryman had to yield to the defense of 
the South was ruinous, — the indirect tribute 
as well as the direct. The farmers of Virginia 
were much to be pitied. Their homes were 
filled with refugee kinsfolk ; wounded Confed- 
erates preferred the private house to the hos- 
pital. Hungry soldiers and soldiers who fore- 



94 TIFO JVARS 



Stalled the hunger of weeks to come, laid siege 
to larder, smoke-house, spring-house. Pay, 
often tendered, was hardly ever accepted. The 
cavalryman was perhaps a trifle less welcome 
than the infantryman, because of the capacious 
horse and the depleted corn-bin, but few were 
turned away. Yet there was the liberal earth, 
and the farmer did not starve, as did the 
wretched civilian whose dependence was a 
salary, which did not advance with the rising 
tide of the currency. The woes of the war 
clerks in Richmond and of others are on rec- 
ord, and important contributions have been 
made to the economical history of the Confed- 
erate States. I will not draw on these stores. 
I will only tell of what I have lived, as de- 
manded by the title of this paper. The income 
of the professors of the University of Virginia 
was nominally the same during the war that it 
was before, but the purchasing power of the 
currency steadily diminished. If it had not 
been for a grant of woodland, we should have 
frozen as well as starved during the last year 
of the war, when the quest of food had become 



TWO JVARS 95 



a serious matter. In our direst straits we had 
not learned to dispense with household serv- 
ice, and the household servants were never 
stinted of their rations, though the masters 
had to content themselves with the most 
meagre fare. The farmers, generous enough 
to the soldiers, were not overconslderate of 
the non-combatants. Often the only way of 
procuring our coarse food was by making con- 
tracts to be paid after the war In legal cur- 
rency, and sometimes payment In gold was ex- 
acted. .The contracts were not always kept, 
and the unfortunate civilian had to make new 
contracts at an enhanced price. Before my 
first campaign In 1861, I had bought a little 
gold and silver, for use In case of capture, and 
If It had not been for that precious hoard I 
might not be writing this sketch. But despite 
the experience of the airy gentlemen who 
alighted In Richmond during the war, even 
gold and silver would not always work won- 
ders. Bacon and corned beef in scant measure 
were the chief of our diet, and not always 
easy to procure. I have ridden miles and 



96 TIVO JFARS 



miles, with silver in my palm, seeking daintier 
food for the women of my household, but in 
vain. There was nothing to do except to 
tighten one's belt, and to write editorials show- 
ing up the selfishness of the farming class and 
prophesying the improvement of the currency. 
No wonder, then, that with such an expe- 
rience a bookish Confederate should turn to 
the Aristophanic account of the Peloponnesian 
war with sympathetic interest. The Athe- 
nians, it is true, were not blockaded as we were, 
and the Athenian beaux and belles were not 
reduced to the straits that every Confederate 
man, assuredly every Confederate woman, can 
remember. Our blockade-runners could not 
supply the demands of our population. We 
went back to first principles. Thorns v/ere for 
pins, and dogwood sticks for toothbrushes. 
Rag-bags were ransacked. Impossible gar- 
ments were made possible. Miracles of turn- 
ing were performed, not only in coats, but even 
in envelopes. Whoso had a dress coat gave it 
to his womankind in order to make the body 
of a riding-habit. Dainty feet were shod in 



TIVO IVARS 97 



home-made foot-gear which one durst not call 
shoes. Fairy fingers which had been stripped 
of jewelled rings wore bone circlets carved by 
idle soldiers. There were no more genuine 
tears than those which flowed from the eyes of 
the Southern women resident within the Fed- 
eral lines when they saw the rig of their kins- 
women, at the cessation of hostilities. And 
all this grotesqueness, all this dilapidation, 
was shot through by specimens of individual 
finery, by officers who had brought back re- 
splendent uniforms from beyond seas, by hero- 
ines who had engineered themselves and their 
belongings across the Potomac. 

Of all this the scholar found nothing in the 
records of the Peloponnesian war. The 
women of Megara may have suffered, but 
hardly the Corinthian women; and the Athe- 
nian dames and damsels were as particular 
about their shoes and their other cordwainer's 
wares as ever. The story that Socrates and 
his wife had but one upper garment between 
them is a stock joke, as I have shown else- 
where. " Who first started the notable jest 



98 TJVO WARS 



It is impossible, at this distance of time, to dis- 
cover, just as it is Impossible to tell whose 
refined wit originated the conception of the 
man who lies abed while his solitary shirt is in 
the wash." The story was intended to illus- 
trate, not the scarcity of raiment in the Pelo- 
ponneslan war, but the abundance of philoso- 
phy in the Socratic soul. All through that war 
the women of Athens seem to have had as 
much finery as was good for them. The pinch 
was felt at other points, and there the Con- 
federate sympathy was keen. 

In The Acharnians of Aristophanes, the 
hero, DiccEopolis, makes a separate peace on 
his individual account with the Peloponneslans 
and drives a brisk trade with the different 
cantons, the enthusiasm reaching its height 
when the Boeotian appears with his ducks and 
his eels. This ecstasy can best be understood 
by those who have seen the capture of a sutler's 
wagon by hungry Confederates ; and the fan- 
tastic vision of a separate peace became a sober 
reality at many points on the lines of the con- 
tending parties. The Federal outposts twitted 



TIVO WARS 99 



ours with their lack of coffee and sugar; ours 
taunted the Federals with their lack of to- 
bacco. Such gibes often led, despite the of- 
ficers, to friendly interchange. So, for 
instance, a toy-boat which bore the significant 
name of a parasite familiar to both sides made 
regular trips across the Rappahannock after 
the dire struggle at Fredericksburg, and 
promoted international exchange between 
"Yank" and "Johnny Reb." The day- 
dream of Aristophanes became a sober cer- 
tainty. 

The war was not an era of sweetness and 
light. Perhaps sugar was the article most 
missed. Maple sugar was of too limited pro- 
duction to meet the popular need. Sorghum 
was a horror then, Is a horror to remember 
now. It set our teeth on edge and clawed off 
the coats of our stomachs. In the army sugar 
was doled out by pinches, and from the tables 
of most citizens it was banished altogether. 
There were those who solaced themselves with 
rye coffee and sorghum molasses regardless of 
ergot and acid, but nobler souls would not be 



TJVO WARS 



untrue to their gastronomic ideal. Necessity 
is one thing, mock luxury another. If there 
had been honey enough, we should have been 
on the antique basis; for honey was the sugar 
of antiquity, and all our cry for sugar was but 
an echo of the cry for honey in the Pelopon- 
nesian war. Honey was then, as it is now, 
one of the chief products of Attica. It is not 
likely that the Peloponnesians took the trouble 
to burn over the beds of thyme that gave Attic 
honey its peculiar flavor, but the Peloponne- 
sians would not have been soldiers if they had 
not robbed every beehive on the march; and, 
sad to relate, the Athenians must have been 
forced to import honey. When Dicaeopolis 
makes the separate peace mentioned above, 
he gets up a feast of good things, and there is 
a certain unction in the tone with which he 
orders the basting of sausage-meat with honey, 
as one should say mutton and currant jelly. In 
The Peace, when War appears and proceeds 
to make a salad, he says, — 

I'll pour some Atlic honey in. 



TWO JFARS 



Whereupon Trygccus cries out, — 

Ho, there, I warn you use some other honey. 
Be sparing of the Attic. That costs sixpence. 

Attic honey has the ring of New Orleans 
molasses; " those molasses," as the article was 
often called, with an admiring plural of 
majesty. 

But a Confederate student, like the rest of 
his tribe, could more readily renounce sweet- 
ness than light, and light soon became a serious 
matter. The American demands a flood of 
light, and wonders at the English don who 
pursues his investigations by the glimmer of 
two candles. It was hard to go back to primi- 
tive tallow dips. Lard might have served, 
but it was too precious to be used in lamps. 
The new devices were dismal, such as the vile 
stuff called terebene, which smoked and smelt 
more than it illuminated, such as the wax 
tapers which were coiled round bottles that 
had seen better days. Many preferred the old 
way, and read by flickering pine-knots, which 
cost many an old reader his eyes. 



TWO WARS 



Now, tallow dips, lard, wax tapers, tere- 
bene, pine-knots, were all represented in the 
Peloponnesian war by oil. Oil, one of the 
great staples of Attica, became scarcer as the 
war went on. " A bibulous wick " was a sin- 
ner against domestic economy; to trim a lamp 
and hasten combustion was little short of a 
crime. Management in the use of oil — other- 
wise considered the height of niggardliness — 
was the rule, and could be all the more readily 
understood by the Confederate student when 
he reflected that oil was the great lubricant as 
well ; that it was the Attic butter, and to a con- 
siderable extent the Attic soap. Under the 
Confederacy butter mounted to the financial 
milky way, not to be scaled of ordinary men, 
.and soap was also a problem. Modern chem- 
ists have denied the existence of true soap in 
antiquity. The soap-suds that got into the 
eyes of the Athenian boy on the occasion of 
his Saturday-night scrubbing were not real 
soap-suds, but a kind of lye used for desperate 
cases. The oil-flask was the Athenian's soap- 
box. No wonder, then, that oil was exceeding 



TWO WARS 103 



precious in the Peloponnesian war, and no 
wonder that all these little details of daily 
hardship come back even now to the old stu- 
dent when he reopens his Aristophanes. No 
wonder that the ever present Peloponnesian 
war will not suffer him to forget those four 
years in which the sea of trouble rose higher 
and higher. 



NOTES 




1865 




1915 



NOTES 

(The marginal numbers refer to the pages of the text) 

This article was prepared (in 1891) at the 7 
instance of Mr. Horace Scudder, the editor of the 
Atlantic Monthly, who had projected a series of 
papers to be written by men who by virtue of educa- 
tion, intellectual endowment and social position were 
supposed to be high and lifted up above vulgar pas- 
sion and prejudice. The business of these elect gen- 
tlemen was to set forth the motives that urged them 
to an active participation in so rude an affair as war. 
After publication in the Atlantic, the essays were to 
be gathered into a book and Mr. Scudder fancied 
that thus collected they would prove a valuable addi- 
tion to the history of the times. The series stopped at 
the third number and the book was never published. 
Whilst I did not concur in Mr. Scudder's view, I 
accepted the compliment and began to write with a 
lighter heart than I bore as I went on. At the end I 
was dipping my pen into something red, into some- 
thing briny, that was not ink. The feeling seems to 
have been contagious, for some years afterwards 
( 1899) Mr. William Archer, in his America To- 
day (p. 142), wrote as follows: 

" I met a scholar-soldier in the South who had 7 
given expression to the sentiment of his race and gen- 



io8 NOTES 

eration in an essay — one might almost say an elegy — 
so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that 
it moved me w^ell-nigh to tears, Reading it at a 
public library, I found myself so visibly affected by 
it that my neighbor at the desk glanced at me in sur- 
prise, and I had to pull m3'self sharply together." 

9 I had a similar experience some years after I 
wrote this paper, w^hen I was spending the summer at 
Westport on Lake Champlain. Wandering far 
enough off into the country to lose myself — for me 
no unfamiliar feat — I joined a man who was driving 
his cows to "town and in my talk with him it turned 
out that he had been through the Valley campaign on 
the other side, and together we recalled encounters 
and scenes that were not recorded in the histories, 
insignificant skirmishes — significant enough to those 
who were killed and maimed. Who remembers the 
little brush at Weir's Cave, where the Confederates 
came near bagging General Merritt? I have not 
been allowed to forget it these fifty years. 

10 Apropos of this passage my friend and classmate 
of the Princeton days. Gen. Bradley T. Johnson, 
told me that one hot day riding to meet a fight 
that would make the day still hotter, he stopped at a 
roadside cabin and asked for a drink of water. The 
woman who brought it, brought it in a broken and 
cracked mug, and he assured me that every ramifica- 
tion of those cracks was indelibly impressed on his 



NOTES 109 

brain. He could have drawn a map of the mug. 
Experiences like these help us to understand the de- 
tails of the Homeric narrative, and to me there is 
nothing unnatural in Homer's mention of the wash- 
ing troughs that Hector saw as he fled before the face 
of Achilles (II. 22, 154 foil.). 

The fight under Early, to which I refer, was 10 
fought July 24, 1864. It was a brilliant feat of arms 
and has left other memories than those recorded. 
As A. D. C. to General Gordon I gave General 
Terry, one of the brigade commanders, the order to 
advance, and I still hear the cry of one of the men 
who had been in a disastrous affair a few weeks 
before — the fight in which Gen. W. E. Jones fell. 
" This hain't no New Hope, Gineral." I still see the 
light of battle on the faces of the men as they went 
forward. My blood tingles as I write. 

" Deboshed " is a reminiscence of an essay of Low- 1 1 
ell's on Reconstruction, in which he makes light of 
Southern claims to aristocracy. 

General Lee always referred to the enemy as 12 
" those people." John S. Wise, Atlantic Monthly, 
April, 1894. Wise is one ear-witness among many, 
and I thought of General Lee, as well as of Dante, 
when I wrote in my Introductory Essay to Pindar, 
xxxviii : 

A word, an epithet, and the picture is there, drawn with 
a stroke. In the second Olympian P. is telling of the 



no NOTES 

blessedness of the souls that have overcome. When he 
comes to the damned, he calls them simply " those." — 
Non ragioniam di lor. 

12 Lieut. Gen. John B. Gordon, Reminiscences, p. 
422. Perhaps I may be pardoned for adding that 
when I read the passage in which niention is made of 
my service on his staff, I wrote to my chief, whose own 
bearing on the battlefield was an inspiration, that no 
tribute to my Greek scholarship I had received or 
could receive would ever be more cherished, if so 
much; and I cited the famous epitaph inscribed on 
the tomb of Aeschylus at Gela. No mention is made 
of his great tragedies. It is simply recorded that 
Aeschylus had quitted himself like a man in the 
Persian war. 

aXKrjV 8' (.vhoKifiov M.apa6oiViov aAaos av etTTOi 

In these Notes I am furnishing a key to the per- 
sons referred to in the article. There is a Confederate 
graveyard near my old home, the University of Vir- 
ginia, in which hundreds of those who fell on the 
field or perished in the hospital, were laid to rest. At 
first a rude headboard marked each grave with the 
name, the company, the regiment, to be replaced, it 
was thought, by some more substantial monument at 
the end of the war; but the end of the war brought 
the consciousness of dire poverty that could hardly 



NOTES 111 

furnish food for the living, and so it was sadly re- 
solved rather than leave these ghastly and decaying 
reminders of individual suffering and sacrifice to 
level the v^^hole field and sow it in grass, but not 
until a pious soul, an English artist who bore the 
un-English name of Scharf, had recorded each name 
and the place of burial on an elaborate plat. Still 
I cannot forbear to contribute my rude shingle here 
and there to the memory of my comrades. The 
staff-officer mentioned here was George H. Wil- 
liamson, of Maryland. Two years before I made 
his acquaintance Mr. William M. Blackford, 
of Lynchburg, wrote in his diary, since privately 
printed, under the date July 25, 1862: Williamson, 
an interesting man, educated at Harvard and abroad, 
was a rising lawyer in Baltimore when the war broke 
out and he enlisted as a private in a Maryland regi- 
ment. 

A revival of religion to counterbalance, as it were, 13 
the revival of brutality, is a recurring phenomenon 
of great wars. The tide of skepticism in Greece was 
checked by the Persian War, and even to-day the 
French army shews a return to the Man of Sorrows, 
whose effigy had been removed from all public build- 
ings. 

The Princeton College room-mate who fell on the 16 
1 8th of July was James Knox Lee, a distant rela- 
tive of the great soldier ; the other was Peyton Ran- 



112 NOTES 

DOLPH Harrison, of Martinsburg (W.) Va., repre- 
sentative of the oldest families in the old state. His 
brother, Dabney Carr Harrison (Princeton, '48), 
another close friend, took service in the Confederate 
army, first as chaplain, then as captain of a company, 
and was killed at Fort Donelson which, as I painfully 
remember, was at first reported as a Confederate 
victory. 

17 Thersites — strange that Schiller in his Siegeslied 
should have forgotten it — never lived to return. 
According to the Scholia Vetera on Lycophron, 999, 
this monkey-shaped (TndrjKOfioptfiO'i) creature was 
slain by Achilles for gouging out the eyes of Pen- 
thesilea's maid, with whom Achilles had fallen in 
love. A better point was made by Ovid, that master 
of points (Am. 2, 6, 41) : Tristia Phylacidae Ther- 
sites funera vidit. 

18 The French artist was Guillaume, who came to 
this country shortly before the war. In the picture 
to which I refer. General Lee was the main figure. 
Guillaume's picture of the Surrender at Appomat- 
tox bore evidence of minute study of every detail of 
that historic event. 

19 The toothbrush was a badge of culture on both 
sides, as the following passage shows : 

" ' Light marching order ' implies that a soldier 
may carry upon his person only a few of the more 
obvious necessities of life and no luxuries save 



NOTES 113 

tobacco. But a soldier must be clad even to sixty 
rounds of ball cartridge. Small wonder is it then, if 
only the lightest toothbrush drawn through the but- 
tonhole of his blouse must suffice as an epitome of 
the refinements of life. Many of the victories of our 
adversaries were fairly attributed to the scantier attire 
and lighter marching order of the men." — Atlantic 
Monthly, May, 1893, p. 214. 

David Ramsay, grandson of the historian and 21 
biographer of Washington of the same name, my 
fellow-student at Gottingen in 1852, fell after heroic 
services at Battery Wagner in 1863. What the state, 
what the country lost in the promise of that rare man, 
this is not the place to rehearse. Scholar, wit, em- 
bodiment of all the inherited social graces of what we 
once called " the better days," delightful companion, 
devoted and generous friend, he is still in memory 
part of my life. 

For Pericles' budget, see Thuc. 2, 13. 24 

Thuc. I, 141: TTjV avTrjv SvvaTai BovXwcnv rj re 
fifylar-q koX eAa^taT?^ StKattoat? a-no twv ojxoLiiiV irpo 
SiKr]<i Tots TTcAa? eTnTaaaoixevr). 

The friend was the late A. Marshall Elliott, 26 
Professor of Romance Languages in the Johns Hop- 
kins, whose life of study was matched by a life of 
adventure. 

Those who suffered in Sherman's March to the 27 
Sea — I was riveted to my bed at the time — were not, 



114 NOTES 

are not so philosophic. See the narrative in Bradley 
Johnson's Life of Joseph E. Johnston. Nor was I 
so philosophical when I followed the raiders of 1863, 
nor when I saw the fires that lighted up the Valley 
of Virginia in 1864, and that was before the syste- 
matic devastation recorded by Merritt, who carried 
it out. " When our army," says Merritt (Battles 
and Leaders, 4, 512), " commenced its return march, 
the cavalry was deployed across the Valley, burning, 
destroying or taking nearly everything of value, or 
likely to be of value to the enemy. It was a severe 
measure, and appears severer now in the lapse of time, 
but it was necessary as a measure of war." The plea 
of 1864 was the same as the plea of 191 4. In a vivid 
sketch of Sherman's March, Prof. Henry E. Shep- 
herd, whose North Carolina home, Fayetteville, 
lay in the track of the invaders (Battles and Leaders, 
4, 678) winds up by saying that the portrayal of it 
" baffles all the resources of literary art and the afflu- 
ence even of our English speech," and those who 
know Professor Shepherd's resources and affluence 
will recognize the desperate nature of the task. As 
for the Valley, I have before me a protest against the 
erection of a monument to Sheridan, in which the 
writer gives an itemized account of the havoc inflicted 
on the property of non-combatants in the County of 
Rockingham alone. The protest reminds me of my 
youthful surprise when I first saw the statue of Tilly 



NOTES lis 

in the Feldherrnhalle at Munich. Somehow I had 
not thought well of Tilly before. But all estimates 
of military exigencies must be revised by the light of 
the new standards of the time in which we live. 
However, as this note goes to the printer, I am made 
aware of an article by Maj. John Bigelow, U. S. A., 
published in the N. Y. Times of June 13, 1915, in 
which the author musters the evidence of the be- 
haviour of Sherman's men. 1864 seems not to have 
been so very far behind 19 1 4 after all. 

" The hate of Celt to Saxon, and the contempt of 28 
Saxon for Celt, simply paled and grew expression- 
less when compared with the contempt and hate felt 
by the Southron towards the Yankee anterior to our 
Civil War and while it was in progress. No 
Houyhnhnms ever looked on Yahoo with greater 
aversion; better, far better death than further con- 
tamination through political association." — C. F. 
Adams, Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity, p. 176. 

One recalls Halleck's Connecticut : 

Virginians look 
Upon them with as favorable eyes 
As Gabriel the devil in paradise. 

Needless to say, the conspiracy theory has long been 29 
discarded. Mr. Paxson, Professor of American His- 
tory in the University of Wisconsin, has devoted a 
volume to shew that while the South was defending 
an impossible cause, it could not hold different views 



ii6 NOTES 

— that these were the unavoidable result of environ- 
ment and natural resources. How different is all 
this from what the N. Y. Times lately reprinted 
from its issue of April 17, 1865. 

" Every possible atrocity appertains to this rebel- 
lion. There is nothing whatever that its leaders have 
scrupled at. Wholesale massacres and torturings, 
wholesale starvation of prisoners, firing of great 
cities, piracies of the cruelest kind, persecution of the 
most hideous character and of vast extent, and finally 
assassination in high places — whatever is inhuman, 
whatever is brutal, whatever is fiendish, these men 
have resorted to. They will leave behind names so 
black, and the memory of deeds so infamous, that the 
execration of the slaveholders' rebellion will be 
eternal." 

True, " slaveholders' rebellion " still survives here 
and there. So William Harrison Clarke, in The 
Civil Service Law, Preface, says: 

" Parties, when they strive solely for principle, are 
the life of a nation ; but when they strive solely for 
pelf, patronage, and power they are its death. Even 
corrupt party leaders may destroy a republic; some- 
times even ambitious leaders may do so. Did a nation 
ever make a narrower escape than did our own during 
the slaveholders' rebellion? Who but ambitious 
party leaders caused that rebellion ? " 
31 " Vous etes de France, mais je suis de Bretagne." 



NOTES 117 

" Eh bien ! Ce n'est pas le meme pays." " Mais c'est 
la meme patrie." La femme se borna a repondre, 
" Je suis de Siscoingnard." — V. Hugo, Quatre- 
Vingt-Treize. 

" The brandished sword of her coat of arms would 33 
have shown what manner of placida quies she would 
have ensued." The proof-reader of the Atlantic not 
being over-familiar with the Massachusetts coat of 
arms {Ense petit placidam sub libertate quiet em) or 
Scriptural language, substituted for the foregoing 
what one reads in the article as printed in the Atlantic 
(p. 82) : " The brandished sword would have shown 
what manner of placida quies would have ensued 

The wish that South Carolina had been scuttled 33 
is the wish of Chilon for Cythera. Herod. 7, 235. 

This impression, erroneous as it seems, was contra- 34 
vened in a letter from Mr. Wm. A. Courtenay, 
Mayor and historian of Charleston, who wrote to 
me : " The W. L. I. was named for George Washing- 
ton. The 22d of February was celebrated as the anni- 
versary from 1807-92 (thirty years ago in Fort 
Sumter under fire), and the connection of the corps 
with Col. Wm. Washington was not until April, 
1827, on the presentation of the Eutaw flag to the 
corps by his widow." However, the memory of the 
lesser Washington is still kept alive, and the William 
Washington house is still one of the show places of 
9 



ii8 NOTES 

my native cit}'. As a further illustration of local 
patriotism I may add that the Charleston boys were 
more excited over the 28th of June, the battle of 
Fort Moultrie, than over the national Fourth of July. 
40 " I think it is not unsafe to assert that nowhere 
did the original spirit of State Sovereignty and alle- 
giance to the State then survive in greater intensity 
and more unquestioning form than in Virginia — the 
* Old Dominion ' — the mother of States and of 
Presidents. 

" State pride, a sense of individuality, has imme- 
morially entered more largely and more intensely 
into Virginia and Virginians than into any other 
section or community of the United States. Only in 
South Carolina and among Carolinians, on the trans- 
Atlantic continent, was a somewhat similar sense of 
locality and obligation of descent to be found. 
There was in it a flavour of the Hidalgo, or of the 
pride which the MacGregors and Campbells took in 
their clan and country. In other words, the Virgin- 
ian and Carolinian had in the middle of the last cen- 
tury, not to any appreciable extent, undergone 
nationalization." — Chas, Francis Adams, Trans- 
Atlantic Historical Solidarity p. 137. 

I have referred to Mr. Adams repeatedly because 
as a man of my time and nearly of my age he under- 
stood the difficulty of moving the point of view fifty 
years backward. 



NOTES 119 

In these days of mutual understanding and mutual 41 
forgiveness, I shall hardly be believed when I say that 
as late as 1885, twenty years after the close of the 
war, some of my Northern friends who had been 
taught the duty of " making treason odious " advised 
me to suppress or modify the following passage in my 
Introduction to Pindar (p. xii) as savoring of dis- 
loyalty : 

The man whose love for his country knows no local 
root, is a man whose love for his country is a poor 
abstraction; and it is no discredit to Pindar that he went 
honestly with his state in the struggle. It was no treason 
to Medize before there was a Greece, and the Greece that 
came out of the Persian war was a very different thing 
from the cantons that ranged themselves on this side and 
on that of a quarrel which, we may be sure, bore another 
aspect to those who stood aloof from it than it wears in 
the eyes of moderns, who have all learned to be Hellenic 
patriots. A little experience of a losing side might aid 
historical vision. That Pindar should have had an intense 
admiration of the New Greece, should have felt the im- 
pulse of the grand period that followed Salamis and 
Plataia, should have appreciated the woe that would have 
come on Greece had the Persians been successful, and 
should have seen the finger of God in the new evolution of 
Hellas — all this is not incompatible with an attitude dur- 
ing the Persian war that those who see the end and do 
not understand the beginning may not consider respectable. 

Of many consentient utterances I select this one by 44 
a prominent Southerner : 



I20 NOTES 

" The Confederate soldiers did not go to war to 
perpetuate slavery. Most of them never owned a 
slave, and our hero, Gen. Robert E. Lee, said that 
if he owned every one of the slaves in the South he 
would give them for the preservation of the Union. 
It was not for the slaves they fought, but for prin- 
ciple, for their homes and native land." — T. F. 
GooDE, Confederate Banquet, January 19, 1893. 

43 " When, within our memory, some flippant Sena- 
tor [Hammond] wished to taunt the people of this 
country by calling them ' the mudsills of society,' he 
paid them ignorantly a true praise ; for good men are 
as the green plain of the earth is, as the rocks and the 
beds of the rivers are, the foundation and flooring 
and sills of the State." — R. W. Emerson, Atlantic 
Monthly, January, 1892, p. 33. 

In an oration delivered before the United Confed- 
erate Veterans, June 14, 1904, Randolph Harrison 

^ McKiM, a former pupil of mine and a cousin of my 
college mates mentioned on page 16, says: "The 
political head of the Confederacy entered upon the 
war, foreseeing (February, 1861) the eventual loss 
of his slaves, and the military head of the Confederacy 
actually set his slaves free before the war was half 
over." — The Motives and Aims of the Soldiers of the 
South in the Civil War, p. 28. The whole oration 
confirms the positions taken in this article. 

49 A recent historian of the war, Paxson (The 



NOTES 121 

Civil War, p. 248), says: " Northern revenge in the 
guise of the preservation of the dearly won Union 
v^^as worse for the South than the war." 

Charles Francis Adams, /. c, p. 165: "Out- 
rages, and humiliations worse than outrage, of the 
period of so-called reconstruction but actual servile 
domination." 

L. c, p. 173: " It may not unfairly be doubted 
whether a people prostrate after civil conflict has ever 
received severer measure than was dealt out to the 
so-called reconstructed Confederate States during the 
years immediately succeeding the close of strife. 
That the policy inspired at the time a feeling of bitter 
resentment in the South was no cause for wonder." 
To me the cause for wonder was is and that a Vir- 
ginian of Virginians should have wholly forgotten 
the bitterness, as is evinced by the following passage 
in an oration delivered shortly after the publication 
of this article: 

" No such peace as our peace ever followed imme- 
diately upon such a war as our war. The exhausted 
South was completely at the mercy of the vigorous 
North, and yet the sound of the last gun had scarcely 
died away when not only peace, but peace and good- 
will were re-established, and the victors and the 
vanquished took up the work of repairing the damages 
of war and advancing the common welfare of the 
whole country, as if the old relations, social, com- 



123 NOTES 

mercial and political between the people of the two 
sections had never been disturbed." — Charles Mar- 
shall, of Lee's Staff, on Grant, May 30, 1892. 
49 It was out of the bitterness of this reconstruction 
period that I penned the following sonnet to the 
memory of John M. Daniel, editor of the Rich- 
mond Examiner, to which paper I contributed more 
than threescore editorial articles during the year 

1863-4: 

DIS MANIBUS 

I. M. D. 

We miss your pen of fire, whose cloven tongue 
Illum'd the good and blasted what was base. 
We miss you, fearless fighter for our race. 

Your arrows words, your bow a will highstrung. 

We miss you, for you tower'd from among 
The herd of writers with that careless grace 
That springs from undisputed strength. Your place 

Is vacant still. Your bow is still uphung. 

'Tis well. This were no time for you. The strings 
Of your proud heart forefelt the blow and broke; 
And when you died, 'twas better thus to die 

Than live to see this swarm of crawling things, 
And burn with words that must remain unspoke 
Where " art is tongue-tied by authority." 

49 The school was the Episcopal High School near 
Alexandria, Virginia; the principal, the late L. M. 
Blackford. 

50 Ov. Her. 3, 106: 

According to Ovid, Briseis was a non-Greek. 



NOTES 123 

Littera, she writes (v. 2), vix bene barbarica Graeca 
notata manu. According to recent authorities, she 
was a Lesbian girl. We know from Homer that 
Achilles was musical as Odysseus was not. 

Tov 8' eupov <f>piva repTro/xevov cjiopfityyt Xiytirj, 
Ka\f, SaiSaAe?/, eVt 8' apyvpeov ^vyov rjev. 
—II. 9, 185-6. 

Lesbos was an island consecrated to music from 50 
the days of Orpheus, and we can imagine the lovers 
singing together and Achilles solacing his loneliness 
by chanting to Patroclus the praises of his lost love. 

The valued friend was and is Archer Anderson, so 
of Richmond, Virginia. 

" Why is it that wherever one goes in all parts of 51 
England one always finds — thoroughly as I believe 
the institution of slavery is detested in this country — 
every man sympathizing strongly with the Southern- 
ers, and wishing them all success? We do so for this 
reason . . . Englishmen love liberty, and the South- 
erner is fighting, not only for his life, but for that 
which is dearer than life, for liberty; he is fighting 
against one of the most grinding, one of the most 
galling, one of the most irritating attempts to estab- 
lish tyrannical government that ever disgraced the 
history of the World." — G. W. Bentinck, quoted 
by Chas. Francis Adams, /. c, p. 1 1 1. 



124 NOTES 

SS The ambitious title, " Two Wars," has been re- 
stored to the headline by typographical pressure. 

S3 History is philosophy teaching by examples. Ps. 
Dionys. xi, 2 (399R) : Icrropia <^iAoo-o^ia iarlv Ik 
irapaSeLyfiaTuiV. 

58 John Augustin Washington. 

61 Spangenberg was a literary " bummer." The 

real author was one Andreas Guarna of Salerno. 

See Frankel, Zeitschrift fiir Litteraturgeschichte, 

xiii, 242. 
61 Pindar's words are : yXvKv 8^ aveCpoiai TroXefioi. 

63 Terror and Affright, II. 15, 19: ws (fxiTo Kai p 
iTTTTOv? KeAcTo Ailfiov T£ ^6/3ov Tc I ^exT/vvfitv. Thcsc 
horses of Ares furnished the names Deimos and 
Phobos for the two satellites of the planet Mars. 
Such traces of familiarity with the classics are refresh- 
ing to one who lives in an age when allusion is under 
the ban. How many appreciate the appropriateness of 
the Baltimore County Timonium, named after Mark 
Antony's growlery in Plutarch? Not many of the 
sports who some years ago laid their bets on Irex 
recalled the line of the Odys ey 13, 86: 

ouSe Kev iLprj$ 
KipKO^ ofiapTrjaucv l\a<^p6TaT0<i ireTerjvwv. 

64 The Scandinavian scholar, Jespersen. 
66 Ach. 527. 

68 The Peloponnesians called it the Attic War 
(Thuc. 5, 28, 3) ; the lonians the Doric War. In a 



NOTES 125 

recent number of the Jahrbiicher, xxxv, No. 2 
(1915), there is a discussion of the name of the 
Peloponnesian War apropos of the present " World- 
war," or, if you choose, " Wirrwarr." For our war 
the misnomer " The Civil War " has been adopted as 
the official designation. 

According to fama clamosa, Winfield was origi- 74 
nally Wingfield, a very common Virginian name. 
The classical parallel of Tromes and Atrometos will 
suggest itself to every one who has read Demosthenes. 
Dem. 18, 129. 

Thuc. 7, 5, 2: ovK e(f)r] TO ajxapTrjixa Ikuvwv dAA* 77 
kavTov ytviaOat. 

Tyrtaeus Fr. 8, 23: 81 

Tjhrj XiVKOV e^ovTa Kaprj ttoAiov re yevciov 

dvjJLOV aTTOTTVeiOVT' aXKl/JiOV iv KOVLTj. 

The first line is taken from II. 22, 74. I do not 
continue the citation because the Homeric passage 
has not been subjected to the refining process of Mr. 
Murr.4y's redactors of the Iliad. 

The Bloody Angle, May 12, 1864, an unforgct-82 
table date. 

Girl in the Carpathians and Scholar in Politics 83 
are titles of current publications taken at random 
to illustrate the personal element and its unfitness. 

aKovwi Pilaxivri; Dem. 18, 112. My Millwood 85 
friend was a scholar of the old times and would not 



126 NOTES 

have paused to consider whether the omission of w 
was due to scorn of Aeschines or dread of the hiatus. 

92 Gresham's law was anticipated by Aristophanes, 
Ran. 718, foil. 

97 As is well known, the Greek had a mania for 
shoes. For women's shoes see Av. Lys. 427. For 
other cordwainer's wares, /. c, 1 10. 
101 Almost as touching as the pluralis maiestaticus of 
" those molasses " is the Scythian archer's personifica- 
tion of honey as 'Attikos yufAt?, Ar. Thesm. 1 192. 

Postscript. — The bulk of the Notes would have been 
greatly augmented, if I had undertaken to explain 1892 as 
well as 1865 to the children of 1915. In 1892 Mr. Car- 
negie (p. 19) was not yet the benefactor of the outworn 
members of my own profession, and Mr. Charles Francis 
Adams was declaiming against the College Fetich to which 
I have borne a life long allegiance. To some of my own 
allusions I have lost the clue and find myself in the cate- 
gory with which Browning has made the world familiar. 



CONTEMPORANEOUS OPINIONS 
OF THE NORTHERN PRESS 



CONTEMPORANEOUS OPINIONS OF 
THE NORTHERN PRESS 

" A poetical view of the Southern cause in the 
Civil War." — The Nation, January, 1892. 

" An attempt on the part of Professor Gildersleeve 
to make the Creed of the Old South seem a little less 
absurd than it has for twenty years past." — Spring- 
field Republican. 

" Professor B. L. Gildersleeve states the Creed of 
the Old South in a way to make every Northern 
man respect those who took up arms like General 
Lee under the conviction that the State had the first 
claim upon their allegiance. The writer would have 
strengthened this sympathy, however, did he show 
that he had been docile to the stern teacher, expe- 
rience, and had come to reject the parochial creed of 
state rights." — Literary World, January 2, 1892. 

" I hope it is not improper to add that wherever, 
in all Christendom, there is hearty appreciation of 
profound learning allied to conscience and to a re- 
fined life, the recent paper of the Johns Hopkins pro- 
fessor of philology will be taken as conclusive proof 
that good and true and able men could uphold the 
cause of the Confederacy even in arms, and never 
doubt in their hearts that they were right." — Jacob 
DoLSON Cox, " Why the Men of '61 Fought for the 
Union," Atlantic Monthly, March, 1892. 



